Black Friday and Thanksgiving online sales surge up again. High Street Retail sales go down. Online is the main channel for Retail now, no doubt.

In case you haven't heard, one of the biggest online retail days is Black Friday, driven by the Thanksgiving holidays in the US. The biggest is probably 'Cyber Monday', the Monday just coming up.

This year, online selling/buying has been up dramatically with most reporting an increase of about +23% and well over a billion usd. Without a doubt, the biggest day ever. Over 57 million Americans visited online retail sites on Black Friday probably trying to avoid that "shopping experience" you can see in the video above.

Thanksgiving day itself was up +32% online.

Black Friday gets huge prominence in the offline world as a big traditional shopping day so the growth of online may be people wanting to avoid the crowds. Or just simply, the ongoing dominance of online at a retail level - everything points to this becoming the preferred channel for all products and even growing at a grocery level. Black Friday ordinary retail high street shopping was DOWN this year by about -2%.

It seems that Amazon have done best, followed by Wal Mart, Best Buy, target and Apple. Amazon just keeps posting higher year-on-year growth rates.

Top growing categories were Digital Content and Subscriptions,followed by packaged goods, video games and consoles and general electronics. But the highest shopped segment was Apparel, in other words clothes, accounting for 25% of all dollars spent. And they said you could never sell clothes online. Never. Ha!

This annual surge is certainly one to which all online retailers should take notice and try to capture some of the activity through special offers or discounts. Remember it's a global world now and retailers need to take heed of things that happen internationally rather than just their local calender.

One thing is for sure. Online retail is going to dominate shopping, no doubt about it. And if you're in retail, you need to be online. Very few of the leading Department stores in fact are and so there's opportunity after opportunity for new start-ups to take that business.

It's just waiting to be done.