On the real estate side, our Third Quarter activities included opening four new Bed Bath & Beyond stores, one buybuy BABY store and one Cost Plus World Market store and the closing of two Bed & Beyond stores.
Including stores opened to date, we are still on track to open approximately 22 new stores company wide during our 2014 Fiscal Year. During this current Fourth Quarter, we opened up our first buybuy BABY store in Canada. On December 5th, we opened our doors in Edmonton. We are excited about the opportunity to grow our baby offerings throughout Canada. It is our intent to continue to optimize our store operations and market coverage by expanding, downsizing, renovating, opening, closing and relocating stores. We continue to actively manage our real estate portfolio in a manner that permits store sizes, layouts, locations and offerings to evolve overtime to optimize market profitability.
Throughout the United States and Canada, we believe we have the opportunity to open stores in new and existing markets across all our concepts. Our goal is to provide more products, services and solutions to our customers and our stores continue to play a vital role in that strategy.
Additionally, in connection with leveraging our merchandise assortments and optimizing our operations, we continue to expand across selected stores, a number of specialty departments such as Health and Beauty Care, Baby, Specialty Food and Beverage. Although the number of these placements continues to evolve, in Bed, Bath & Beyond stores alone, we have nearly 200 locations that have at least one specialty department already and we believe there is an opportunity to add at least one more or one or more additional specialty departments to more than 1/3 of these stores. Also we believe there is an opportunity to launch specialty departments in roughly 240 Bed, Bath & Beyond stores that currently do not have one.
We are also a partner in a Mexican joint-venture which opened one Bed, Bath & Beyond store earlier this year and currently operates five Bed, Bath & Beyond stores in Mexico City market. We continue to be excited about Mexico and with our partners, plan to open additional stores in the future.
And as you are probably aware, in addition to our retail operations, we are also growing our complimentary institutional business with the potential to utilize our existing vendor base to provide products and services, hospitality, travel and other institutional customers.
I will now turn the call over to Sue to review our Quarterly financial results and our planning assumptions. Sue?
Susan E. Lattmann, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer
Thank you Steve. Net sales for the Fiscal Third Quarter were approximately $2.9 billion, approximately 2.7% higher than net sales in the prior year period. Of this increase, approximately 60% was attributable to the increase in comp sales and the remainder is primarily from new stores. Comparable sales for the Fiscal Third Quarter increased approximately by 1.7% this year compared with an increase of 1.3% last year. The comparable sales increase this year was attributed to increases in both the average transaction amount and the number of transactions.
Gross profit for the Fiscal Third Quarter was approximately 38.4% of net sales compared to approximately 39.2% of net sales in the corresponding period a year ago. The decrease in the gross profit margin as a percentage of net sales in order of magnitude was primarily attributed to first, an increase in coupon expense resulting from an increase in redemption partially offset by a slight decrease in the average coupon amount and Second, an increase in net direct-to-customer shipping expense which continues to be impacted by a reduction in bedbathandbeyond.com free shipping threshold to $49 which is due to anniversary next month.
Selling General and Administrative (SG&A) expenses for the Third Quarter were approximately 26.4% of net sales as compared to 26.1% of net sales in the prior year period. This 30 basis point increase in SG&A as a percentage of net sales was primarily attributable to increased technology expenses and related depreciation and increased advertising expenses partially offset by the year-over-year net benefits of certain non-recurring items primarily relating to credit card fee litigation.
