Online sales are already spiking as shoppers take advantage of early deals that will leave them free to enjoy Thanksgiving at home instead of in stores. Data show retailers are benefiting from the strategy of starting Black Friday promotions early. Online sales on Tuesday were up 21% over the same day last year, according to IBM Watson Trend, which tracks spending by monitoring millions of transactions from retail websites. Consumers are also spending more per order, the average order value on Tuesday from mobile and desktop shoppers was up more than $5 from a year ago to $135.20, according to IBM. Much like last year, retailers started making their deals available earlier this season in a bid to get ahead of competition, give shoppers more options and satisfy increasing appetites for online shopping. Plus, the sales cater to shoppers who don't necessarily want to shop on Thanksgiving, which is when retailers have started opening stores for Black Friday sales in recent years, says Jay Henderson, director of IBM Marketing Cloud. "As retailers make the deals available earlier, (consumers are) shopping earlier so they can get that out of the way and focus on Thanksgiving Day with their families," he says. Mark Blakley, a 31 year-old from Tulsa, Okla., says he and his wife Megan have already purchased several items from their shopping list this week at 'Black Friday' prices, including a 16GB iPad Air from Staples that he was able to order at the advertised $319 Black Friday price on Sunday. They'll likely still go out to some stores on Thursday, he says, because it's become a family tradition, but they won't hit as many or spend as much time shopping. "Why go fight the crowds and wait in line for an hour when you can do it for five minutes at home," he says. Amazon started offering Black Friday deals last Friday and plans to roll out new offers as often as every five minutes through Black Friday on Nov. 27. The prolonged sale appears to already be paying off for Amazon, leading to a 12% rise in desktop traffic on Nov. 22 compared to average visits over the previous three Sundays, according to SimilarWeb, a market intelligence firm. arget's '10 Days of Deals', the retailer is rolling out discounts on different categories, such as electronics or kitchenware, every day from Nov. 22 through Dec. 1, also appears to be spurring early spending. The retailer's online sales were up 43.2% over Nov. 1-18 compared to the same period a year ago, according to Slice Intelligence, which monitors email receipts from a panel of more than three million U.S. online shoppers. Walmart, which opted for fewer flash deals this holiday season in favor of making promotions available over a longer period of time, saw an online sales uptick of 11.6% in the Nov. 1-18 period, according to Slice. (Source: USA Today)