Amazon have successfully extended Black Friday to a ten day period with the Amazon Black Friday Sale 2018 kicking off today. At the same time eBay have launched their Black Friday’s come early deals. High Street retailers such as Argos and have also launched deals as have brands such as British Gas Hive, with Currys PC World asking consumers to pre-register for their Black Friday offers.
Black Friday is so key to Amazon this year that they actually started a pre-Black Friday sale in advance of the 10 day Amazon Black Friday Sale 2018 period.
Unsurprisingly Amazon’s deals include Amazon devices include Amazon Echo from £54.99 (was £89.99), all-new Echo Dot for £24.99 (was £49.99), all-new Kindle Paperwhite from £89.99 (was £119.99), Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote for £24.99 (was £39.99), Fire 7 tablet from £29.99 (was £49.99) and Fire 7 Kids Edition tablet from £59.99 (was £99.99).
eBay are going all out with deals that smash Amazon’s selling price, for example a Philips Series 7000 MG7710/13 which is currently selling on Amazon for £70.39 can be picked up on eBay for £24.99. A Little Tikes “Modern Kitchen” Toy is listed on Amazon at £120.00 but can be snagged on eBay Black Friday deals for £107.99.
Amazon really need Black Friday to be a success this year, they saw a quarter of a trillion dollars wiped off their market cap when they set expectations for less revenue in the fourth quarter then investors predicted. If Black Friday is a flop then it will further lower the share price. We’ll be looking very closely at the language of Amazon’s post Black Friday announcements – generally on every sales event they’ve smashed previous records but for Prime Day we suspect sales were muted and the only reason it was a success was due to Amazon’s expansion into more geographies then in the past.
For merchants, Black Friday is key and over half of all products sold on Amazon are generally supplied by third party sellers so the more hype around the Amazon Black Friday Sale 2018 the better along with the resultant overflow to products not included in the deals program as consumers start their Christmas shopping.
