3D TV Purchases Fall Short of Hype on Black Friday

our editor recommends

Consumer Electronics Industry Anticipates Black Friday Sales Increase

Despite significant hype from manufacturers, only 5% of consumers that purchased electronics over the holiday weekend bought 3DTVs, according to the final tally of the Consumer Electronics Association's Black Friday Survey.

However overall consumer electronics purchases were up from last year, with 57% of holiday shoppers buying some type of consumer electronics product, up from 54% in last year's survey. Electronics were the second most popular product category, second only to clothing, the findings suggested.

The most frequently purchased consumer electronics items by holiday shoppers that bought electronics were: Video game accessories, purchased by 39% of those consumers; portable MP3 or digital media players, purchased by 37%; video game consoles, 36%; digital cameras, 34%; computers, 29%; televisions (all types), 26%; and notebooks or laptop computers, 24% of those consumers.

Of holidays shoppers that bought consumer electronics this weekend, 16% purchased Smartphones, 13% grabbed eReaders; and 12% picked up Blu-ray players (3D ready was not a separate category).

On the lower end of the survey, 6% of the consumer electronics purchases were tablets, 6% were Internet-enabled TVs and 5% were netbooks.

A few points of note on the CEA Survey results, the top category of video game accessories, which includes the Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Move, was not counted in CEA's 2009 survey. Video games console purchases jumped from 28% in 2009 to 36% in 2010, and digital cameras jumped from 24% a year ago to 34%. Additional leaps were smartphones that went from 6% in 2009 to 16% this year; and eReaders, that went from 2% to 13%.

Blu-Ray players moved from 10% in 2009 to 12% this year.

Most of the electronics shopping was done at mass merchants, though the study found that nearly 25% of all electronic purchases were made online.