aggregatedcontent

Have retailers’ earlier and earlier deals each holiday season made Black Friday moot? Not quite. Some 87 million Americans still hit stores on Friday, according to a National Retail Federation (NRF) survey released on Sunday. But by ramping up holiday sales events more intensely than ever, and as early as the first week of November, retailers took a big bite of what's long been the busiest shopping weekend of the year. Total spending for the four-day weekend that started on Thanksgiving is expected to reach $50.9 billion, down 11.3 percent from last year's estimated $57.4 billion, according to NRF projections.

Total spending on gift cards is expected to reach $31.74 billion, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). Gift cards have been the most requested holiday item eight years in a row. The NRF said total spending on gift cards has increased 83 percent since 2003, when it began tracking people's intentions to give the cards as holiday presents.

Black Friday weekend is the year's biggest promotional event for most major U.S. retailers, and yet there are prominent holdouts ignoring it - or at least being discreet about their specials. Tiffany & Co., Dollar Tree and T.J. Maxx are among the chains that aren't promoting Black Friday on their websites. That's a sharp contrast with the supersized fonts advertising sales at Wal-Mart, Macy's and Best Buy.

Email volume will continue to trend downward over the next couple hours followed by a mid-afternoon bump. Are your remails ready? Here are a few last-minute tips to make the most of your afternoon remails without the need to redesign your emails:

Wal-Mart said Thanksgiving Day delivered the second-highest online sales day ever, topped only by Cyber Monday last year. In a press release Friday, Laura Phillips, senior vice president of merchandising at Wal-Mart U.S., said more than 25 million people downloaded the retailer's Black Friday ad. Tablets, TVs, sheets, children's apparel and video gaming were the top five categories of the night, while Disney's "Frozen" Snow Glow Elsa doll was one of the night's top toys.

This report looks at U.S. online shopping transactions observed on Thanksgiving Day as consumers, retailers and marketers got an early start on the holiday shopping season. Here are some of the key findings: online sales were up 14.3 percent over the same period on Thanksgiving 2013; mobile traffic accounted for 52.1 percent of all online traffic, an increase of 22.4 percent year-over-year; and mobile sales accounted for 32.3 percent of all online sales, an increase of 25.4 percent year-over-year.

Holiday shopping in the U.S. kicked off earlier than ever this year, leaving some customers who didn't want to skip out on their Thanksgiving celebrations without the bargains they were seeking.

This is the first Christmas in four years that J.C. Penney isn't confusing customers by discontinuing merchandise, killing coupons, introducing brands or having big chunks of its stores under construction. And its merchants and marketers have had a full year to plan Christmas 2014 without a revolving door of its leadership and radical changes in pricing strategy or product mix. "Last year, we didn't have a lot of lead time, but we did have a point of view with our ‘jingle more bells’ campaign," said Deb Berman, senior vice president of marketing.

A lawmaker in Ohio wants stores in the state to pay triple wages for employees who work on Thanksgiving, an effort that comes as Macy's, the holiday's quintessential retailer, is allowing its workers to choose whether to work that day. Both are attempts to counter frustration among workers and their families over holiday store hours that have expanded into the holiday. State Rep. Mike Foley, a Democrat from Cleveland, said his bill would allow employees to bow out of the holiday shift without job sanctions while protecting family time from excessive consumerism.

eBay won't say it outright, so I'll say it for the company: its same-day delivery experiment is pretty much dead. On yesterday's earnings call with analysts, eBay's CEO John Donahoe was asked for an update on the eBay Now service, which lets shoppers order goods from local big-box stores via an app and get the goods delivered to them that very day. "There's an enormous amount of money that's going to be spent in same-day delivery, and I don't think that's going to be … that's not essential to our core, target consumer," Donahoe said.