How were your Black Friday 2017 sales? Were consumers as engaged as ever or has Black Friday been diluted in the UK with most retailers running sales over a 10 day period combined with the economy leaving shoppers with less cash in their pockets?
Whilst it will be a couple of days before we see the full picture, it appears that sales in the US were up, the UK high streets were relatively quite and UK shoppers purchased more items but at lower average selling prices.
Black Friday 2017 Sales
In the US, early reports indicate a healthy 16% to 18% rise in online sales this Black Friday sales compared to 2016. Shoppers spent $5 billion in 24 hours, compared to the $3.34 billion spent on Black Friday last year, according to data from Adobe Digital Insights. This still falls far short from the 39% growth seen on Alibaba’s Singles’ Day showing that the future of ecommerce growth lies in the East.
However in the UK Black Friday was a more muted affair with a distinct lack of crowds queuing for shops to open on Oxford Street. According to PCA Predict, the number of shoppers online between midnight and 7am was 2% lower than 2016. But that followed an 11% rise in shopping in the previous week suggesting that retailers have achieved their goal of spreading the load over a peak period rather than a single mega-sales day.
Black Friday 2017 saw more transactions but at a lower value
Barclaycard’s guesstimate is that that Black Friday 2017 in the UK is up around 8% based on the number of transactions they processed. Records were broken as they processed a 976 transactions per second between 12pm and 1pm compared to last year’s peak of 791 transactions per second. However consumers are seeking genuine deals as the monetary value of purchases slowed.
“The value spent is growing at a slightly slower rate than the number of transactions, indicating consumers may be opting to buy more goods at a lower price rather than investing in a handful of higher-value items. Nevertheless, it’s ‘so far, so normal’ on the high street and retailers will likely be encouraged by the results.”
– Paulette Rowe, MD, Barclaycard Payment Solutions
Amazon Strikes
Black Friday was also marred for Amazon in Italy and Germany as workers downed tools choosing the busiest day of the year to go on strike. However as Amazon have taken on hordes of temporary workers for the run up to Christmas this is unlikely to significantly impact their operations.
One Response
Well we clearly have had the busiest weekend of the year, and have been at it all weekend things seem to be drying up now however. It was where we sold our products this year that has been different. Not counting what we sold from Thur night and on Friday by 16.00.
Amazon FBA was about 5% and eBay UK was only about 25% (UK sales are actually pretty shocking, eBay have done nothing but push corporate customers and the independents have just been left to it), they are finished for smaller independents unless you are really niche, it is just a scrap to the bottom in price now.
We had another 10% of our sales direct on our on website which was awesome.
The VAST majority of items we sold were on other niche sites and account for the remaining 60% and all into the EU, we started removing lines from eBay just to fill orders.
The UK is just dominated now by the large corporates and is a drastically shrinking market for us.
People are more savvy now they realise the big companies are just shoveling rubbish and manufactured sales on them, and lets be honest people are skint. I even said to my own wife do not be spending a load of money on me, I would rather we put it to a nice holiday away in the summer.