Mobile Payments Leader PayPal Alone Processes $1 Billion on Black Friday

December 5, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

It’s hard to believe that Black Friday was actually over a week ago, and we’re still getting in news about the numbers on this amazing day of shopping. The latest report comes from PayPal, who reported that its mobile transaction volume for the big day was up 42 percent to clear $1 billion, a record for the company.

That alone is a big step, but the hits kept coming. Not only was payment growth huge on Black Friday, but it was actually bigger on Black Friday than it was on Cyber Monday, showing that the mobile payments processor’s presence is increasing all over the scale.

Mobile payments volume in the time between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday represented nearly half—43 percent—of PayPal’s worldwide payment volume. Thanksgiving itself saw huge gains, bringing it to be one of the 10 biggest shopping days of the year. Giving Tuesday, a more recent invention, also saw some major gains over last year’s figures.

Here, however, is where it gets interesting. The top 10 shopping apps that are found on the Apple App Store actually increased first-time download figures 16.3 percent on Black Friday. That implies, and pretty strongly too, that these apps were specifically downloaded to get some shopping done on Black Friday.

While some here might dismay just a bit at the news of Thanksgiving’s rise as a shopping day—whatever happened to turkey and family and board games?—this probably shouldn’t be too much of a problem. After all, most of us know that Thanksgiving isn’t a wall-to-wall activity, so in those times in between clearing the table and washing the dishes and such, there’s room to add a little shopping to the day. If you’re one of those families who has to watch the Macy’s parade or the Westminster dog show that goes on that day, then you’ve got another option if you couldn’t care less about the big showdown between the Lhasa Apso and the Labradoodle.

It’s all about options, at the end of the day, and mobile payments are giving us those options. The longer-term effects will require some more study, but in the end, at least we have this path to consider now.