A rush of deep discounts and the growth of flexible payment options were the drivers behind $9.8 billion in online sales in the U.S. on Black Friday — a record figure for the day. According to Adobe Analytics, sales were up by 7.5% on last year’s numbers (you can see those here). Sales easily surpassed Thanksgiving figures and growth rate, as well as Adobe’s own predictions for the day. On Thursday U.S. consumers spent, $5.6 billion, up 5.5%; the analysts originally predicted sales of $9.6 billion for Black Friday. Salesforce, which uses different metrics to Adobe and says that it crunches numbers on transactions for some 1.5 billion consumers, also said that Black Friday online sales exceeded its expectations. They totalled $16.4 billion in the U.S. and $70.9 billion globally, and a record 79% of all shopping traffic — both browsing and buying — was carried out on mobile handsets. Black Friday is a bellwether shopping day, for years seen as the day that the holiday sales period, the most important for retails, kicks off. …