Black Friday is more like an online-shopping carnival these days.

Smash the bricks and destroy the mortar. Black Friday remains the biggest sales event in the United States, breaking 3 billion US dollars for the first time in history. But people are finding out they no longer have to have fist fights over 42-inch flat-screens.

What an increasing number of shoppers are doing is finger-fighting on six-inch smartphone screens. Despite a strong backbone in offline retailing, American retailers are putting increasing efforts into attracting buyers online.

"E-commerce in the US is quite different from that in China, because e-commerce in the States is still supplemental to offline sales. In the future, the trend will be a further mixing of online and offline sales. For example, people could pay and select the product online, but pick-ups and after-sale service will be conducted offline." Senior Analyst Chen Tao said.

With an increasing number of Black Friday deals becoming available online, Chinese customers are also joining in the shopping spree across the Pacific, taking advantage of cross-border e-commerce.

"I had put things in the shopping carts on cross-border e-commerce apps, and checked them out on Black Friday."

"Cross-border e-commerce has good deals for Black Friday. I prefer Yangmatou."

Cross-border e-commerce sites in China including Amazon China and Yangmatou made extra preparations this year so that shoppers could place orders ahead of the actual Black Friday.

For them, Black Friday was their opportunity to fight back against the major Chinese e-commerce companies that made billions of dollars on the Double 11 Shopping Spree earlier this month.

"Some independent cross-border e-commerce sites tend to focus more on Black Friday, while the larger e-commerce companies focus on double 11. Black Friday can be a good opportunity for them to not only sell but also to help people to get to know them and so attract more customers." Chen Tao said.

And with Black Friday becoming less offline in its home market, big US department stores like Macy's have started to bring Black Friday discounts into China by working with Alibaba.

Other upscale US department stores such as Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue are also making their online shops available to Chinese customers through their own Chinese web sites. At the moment, cross-border e-commerce takes up about 10% of all e-commerce sales in China.