transactions for some 1.5 billion consumers

Sales easily surpassed Thanksgiving figures and growth rate, as well as Adobe’s own predictions for the day. On Thursday U.S. consumers spent, $5.6 billion, up 5.5%; the analysts originally predicted sales of $9.6 billion for Black Friday.

Salesforce, which uses different metrics to Adobe and says that it crunches numbers on transactions for some 1.5 billion consumers, also said that Black Friday online sales exceeded its expectations.

They totalled $16.4 billion in the U.S. and $70.9 billion globally, and a record 79% of all shopping traffic — both browsing and buying — was carried out on mobile handsets.