Everyone by now knows that Black Friday is a crazy day of the year and most of us are familiar with the videos of people pushing each other out of the way just to get a good deal on the latest 4K TV. However, realistically that doesn’t happen any more as over the past few years Black Friday has very much become an online event that sends shock waves through e-commerce business, payment systems and of course advertising.
I wanted to give a little bit of insight into why Black Friday is so important for retailers, especially e-commerce business and hopefully convince you that it should be part of your advertising strategy. I will then also make a follow-up video to this discussing how to take advantage of Black Friday using Facebook ads, originally I wanted to fit it all into one video but there’s so much to talk about I decided I had to split it into two videos.
So let’s get into it.
Now everyone loves a few Black Friday insights, however, the majority are based on the US so here’s some UK figures for you from 2018 and if you want to go and proof check these then all of the references are in the description below.
In total UK shoppers spent £1.49 billion on Black Friday alone 2018.
It’s estimated that 50.4% of all adult women in the UK are Black Friday shoppers and men are close with an estimated 45.1% of them being Black Friday Shoppers – so nearly half of all adults in the UK will shop on Black Friday! Considering there are roughly 44 million adults in the UK that means that 22 million people will be shopping on Black Friday. However, interestingly Men tend to spend more than women with an average spend of £257 compared to £204 for women.
Millennials are the most likely age group to shop on Black Friday with 53% of them participating in Black Friday, while Gen Xers come in second with 49.5% and Baby Boomers are third with 27%.
As for devices, in the e-commerce world, we tend to see mobile as the lead device almost everywhere. However, not on Black Friday, 45% of all Black Friday spending in 2018 was on a desktop or laptop, whilst 26% was in-store and mobile came in at a dreary 3rd with 24%. This suggests to me that consumers are very much in a buying mode so they use their more substantial devices such as laptops and desktop pcs.
So, what are people actually buying? Well in a survey from PWC 56% of people buy Electrical, 45% will buy clothing, 38% will buy stocking fillers and 29% will buy health and beauty products.
What draws people into to buy some much on Black Friday? Well, according to Hitwise the top rising stars of Black Friday last year drove sales by offering deep site-wide discounts such as BooHoo which ran with “60% off everything”, Matalan and Pretty Little Thing both went with “50% off everything” and Wayfair went with “up to 70% off everything”.
Also, we can’t ignore the elephant in the room. Amazon. Amazon had a 26% share of all online store visits in the UK between Black Friday & Cyber Monday whilst eBay also took a 7.3% share. So that’s a third or the whole market dominated by two e-commerce stores. Also to highlight the sheer scale of Amazon, last Black Friday it sold 100,000 toys in the UK by mid-morning on the day. That’s a rate of 167 toys a minute – just in the UK. And that’s just toys, one of their less popular categories.
And to top it all off it’s estimated that will spend more than £7 billion this year from Black Friday through to Cyber Monday.