Black Friday was red hot for Amazon.com.
According to a statement released by the web retail giant, customers purchased four times as many Kindles as they had on the previous year's Black Friday.
Though Amazon's release was shot on details, it did say that sales were helped significantly by the 2-month-old Kindle Fire, the day's bestselling Kindle model. Many customers even bought multiple Kindles, presumably keeping one for themselves and giving the other as a gift.
But Kindle wasn't Amazon's only win of the weekend. As reported by Comscore, an Internet research marketing company, Amazon was the most visited retail site, with 50 percent more traffic than other top sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple. (All of these sites saw traffic gains in the double digits on November 25.)
Despite the fact that Apple's Black Friday deals were fairly conservative compared to other retailers, the Cupertino-based retailer reportedly saw record sales, as well. 9to5 Mac reports that, Black Friday was Apple's biggest sales day of all time.
While exact numbers haven't been released, an Apple insider reportedly told 9to5 Mac that by 7 p.m. on November 25, Apple had already surpassed their expected fourfold increase in sales. The MacBook Air and iPad were the strongest sellers of the day, discounted by $101 and $41 respectively.
Overall, online holiday spending appears to be way up. According to comScore, 50 million Americans visited online stores on Black Friday, where they spent $816 million, an increase of 26 percent since last year. In the first 25 days of November, Americans spent $12.7 billion online, which is 15 percent more than in the same time period in 2010. Which is saying something since online shopping certainly wasn't small potatoes then.
By contrast, Cyber Monday 2010 brought in over $1 billion and was the single biggest day of online spending ever. Revenues for this year's Cyber Monday are supposed to be even bigger, with 78 percent of retailers offering some kind of online promotion.
According to a statement released by Shop.org, online retailers aren't just trying to reach cyber shoppers through their websites but also on customers' mobile devices. The number of customers who plan on using their mobile devices to shop on Cyber Monday has more than tripled since 2009. According to Shop.org, 17.8 million say they will use their phones or tablets to shop on November 28.
To see what kind of deals are available to Cyber Monday shoppers, click here to view our roundup of sales from around the web.