Amazon has reported that last Friday, Black Friday, was its most successful day ever in the UK with 7.4 million sales made. That’s something like 86 sales per second. Sadly we don’t have a number of what that meant in pounds.
It seems like some of the ridiculous frenzied scenes we saw last year on the High Street were not repeated as shoppers turned to ecommerce to grab the bargains.
It’s said that roughly 20% of online retailers experienced some kind of downtime and outage problems (although not eBay for once) with John Lewis, Boots and GAME all named as companies having problems withe their websites. Agency Ampersand kept a watching brief there.
Ampersand MD Darryl Adie suggested this was a good opportunity to think ahead to 2016: “For retailers that have been adversely affected by increased Black Friday traffic online, now is the perfect the time to act fast and gather all the data they have available to them. Although it’s a long way off, the next few weeks should be used to prepare for Black Friday 2016. Ever-extending sales periods like this are notoriously hard to predict. Retailers should immediately delve deep into hour-by-hour analytics reporting and cross check with how and when systems outages occurred. Starting load and performance testing right away will give retailers the best chance of avoiding outages next year.”
And, of course, we’re expecting more deals and excitement as Cyber Monday kicks off.
Perhaps of more interest is whether the interest, publicity and traffic generated by the Black Friday hype that Amazon has clearly so successfully surfed also benefited Amazon third-party sellers. We do hope so.
And how are you keeping up? Busy? Having any problems with couriers?
If you’re an Amazon seller, tip us the wink. Has it been a good weekend for you?
