The holiday season is off to a hot start, with Thanksgiving shopping breaking records for online sales. Mickey Mericle, vice president of marketing and insights at Adobe, joined us to chat about this season's most notable trends.
Adobe is forecasting online sales this season to be over $107 billion, nearly 14 percent higher than last year. The company expects e-commerce to outpace in-store retail by 10 percent. Even though Black Friday has tons of deals, Adobe predicts Cyber Monday to become the largest online shopping day in history.
Mericle breaks down how retailers are reinventing the ways their advertising reaches consumers. She says social media is the fastest-growing way to stand out. Despite growth on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, Mericle says email is still the most popular way.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said Thursday that the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. in the current fiscal quarter will be sourced from India, while iPads and other devices will come from Vietnam as the company works to avoid the impact of President Trump’s tariffs on its business. Apple’s earnings for the first three months of the year topped Wall Street’s expectations thanks to high demand for its iPhones, and the company said tariffs had a limited effect on the fiscal second quarter’s results. Cook added that for the current quarter, assuming things don’t change, Apple expects to see $900 million added to its costs as a result of the tariffs.