If you’re curious to know what’s topping people’s wish lists this holiday season, just take a look at online sales. No big surprise, electronics are where it’s at. Based on information provided by fraud prevention experts (and iovation partner) Retail Decisions (ReD), the top-ten list of products sold online during Black Friday was dominated by GPS systems, televisions, digital cameras and video game consoles.

Besides providing statistics on what online purchases people were spending their hard-earned money on during Black Friday, ReD also noted that online criminals were out in force, busy spending other people’s money. “Whilst online retailers witnessed a huge upturn in sales this Black Friday, fraudsters are also ’spending’ more, with an average value of $248 per transaction online, 23% more than the average genuine customer,” said ReD’s CEO, Carl Clump. (more…)

Good news for online retailers came this weekend as reports showed that this year’s online sales during Black Friday were up 11% from last year, with U.S. shoppers ringing up $595 million worth of orders throughout the day. The bulk of the increases, not surprisingly, went to the largest stores. As the blog on the Wall Street Journal reports:

The retail sites for Amazon.com, Apple, Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart each saw more than 4 million unique visits Friday, comScore said, with Amazon receiving the most traffic (up 28% from 2008). Apple, Best Buy and Wal-Mart sites also experienced double-digit traffic gains. According to Experian Hitwise, another Web monitoring firm, other e-commerce standouts included Sears, Staples and Dell.

These results are welcome news for retailers who have been concerned that fear of identity theft could have a noticeably negative impact on sales. Just last week SC Magazine predicted overall online spending to be down this year because of such fears. Luckily, so far, this does not appear to be the case. (more…)