Accounting outfit sees uptick in online holiday sales for sole proprietors

An online accounting outfit claims that small businesses seriously cashed in on the Thanksgiving triple-play including Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday.  According to a report released this week by Outright, their small business customers showed an average increase of 23% over last year during the record-breaking weekend.  Sole proprietors fared even better reporting an average gain of more than 400% from just $100 in 2010 to about $440 this year.  Outright’s findings are based on aggregated data from a random sample of its own small business customers and sole proprietors with less than $10,000 in revenue who sell on much larger sites such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy

Thanksgiving weekend has long marked the beginning of the all-important holiday shopping season.  First there was Black Friday, or the day after Thanksgiving, which traditionally marks the point at which retailers start making money or going into black.  Small Business Saturday was created last year by American Express to help balance the Black Friday gains posted by larger retailers.  And Cyber Monday extended the opening of the holiday retail season even further with the addition of online sales and bargains.  Although this report provides just a narrow snap shot of Outright's own customer data, for those customers at least it is a positive start to an increasingly important holiday season.