If you believe Saturday Night Live, Black Friday was a discount day set to be put out to pasture two years ago, along with the creepy Best Buy employee, Andrew.
Indeed, statistics show Black Friday spending may have dipped quite severely between 2013 and 2014, but that doesn’t mean the phenomenon is set to decease completely. It simply means the goalposts have been shifted.
Take a look at the facts: once upon a time, before the Thanksgiving Day parade was over, Black Friday shoppers were in planning mode. Before the turkey was cleared from the dinner table, they’d get out there, waiting in line.
But then the savvier retailers recognized the internet was a much safer, cheaper place to offer up discount day bargains without the throngs and the hordes baying for blood, and shoppers realized it meant you could stay at home recovering from the meat sweats rather than sitting in a deckchair wrapped in a sleeping bag hanging around outside a closed mall in the dark and the cold.
Thanksgiving Day
So what’s changed? The first thing is that Black Friday is no longer just a Friday event.
“Black Friday doesn’t represent the kickoff to Christmas shopping anymore,” says Howard Dvorkin, the chairman of Debt.com. “More shoppers are skipping the long lines outside retailers on Friday morning because many Black Friday deals start on Thanksgiving night with many stores with openings around 6 p.m.”
Dvorkin says two factors have diminished the importance of Black Friday: firstly, that deals roll into the Thanksgiving weekend and beyond, and secondly, that “door buster deals” are always more readily available online. The message to retailers? Don’t be fooled into thinking that Black Friday is only for a day. Many would suggest it’s the start of six weeks of discounting peaks and troughs that stretches into and beyond Christmas.
Cyber Monday
It may be back to work for most folk next Monday, but that means getting on the work computer and bagging more deals on the boss’s watch, because while Black Friday remains the most popular shopping day over the Thanksgiving weekend, with almost 70 percent of shoppers buying on this day versus 38 percent on Cyber Monday, it’s the Monday when shoppers spend more. Indeed, the average spend per shopper on Cyber Monday was $468 versus $309 on Black Friday in 2014. Retailers know full well – Black Friday can whet the appetite for Cyber Monday to bring home the bacon.
Buying strategies are getting serious
Those who sit in the cold, waiting in line for a store to open have a strategy, there’s no denying that. But the savvy retailer knows that this extends far beyond simply knowing what Thermos to take down to the queues in the early hours of Friday morning.
A survey of 1,000 consumers from Blue Yonder found that 73 percent of Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers have a full-on strategy in place to bag the best bargains. Strategies include going to the shops in advance to work out where the product is located on the shelves (21%), working in a team to hunt down the items (17%), getting there as early as possible to queue (21%) and, for Cyber Monday in particular, checking internet connections to the retailer in advance. What does this mean? Retailers – your customers are checking you out right now. Get the messaging aligned on and offline asap. It’s all about building anticipation between now and the official start of the shopping season.
Black Friday is international
Based on the findings from 126 retailers and 11.4 million online transactions in the UK during the same period in 2014, market analysts Criteo expect Black Friday to be the highest sales peak for online sales in the UK. Indeed, many experts forecast more than £1.1billion being spent this year.
Elsewhere, French shoppers are expected to spend £159m during Black Friday 2015, while consumers in Germany will fork out more than £281 million. Why is this important? Because last year, in Europe, sales from desktops were strongest, representing 57 percent of all purchases on Black Friday. Ecommerce is a global opportunity, and people across the world are increasingly buying into the discount day mindset and are expectant of global retail players.
What’s more, further Criteo data says mobile sales over the corresponding weekend in 2014 increased from 43 per cent on Black Friday to 48 per cent on the Saturday and 49 per cent on the Sunday. And even on the Tuesday after, sales across all key retail categories were 28 percent above their pre-season baseline in Europe.
“Last year the popularity of Black Friday took some retailers by surprise but this year they are prepared, realising that many consumers will start their Christmas shopping by making the most of the deals on offer online,” says Jon Buss, Criteo’s MD of UK and Northern Europe.
“In order to maximize the impact of Black Friday, retailers need to engage with consumers through personalised and relevant online advertising, reaching them on the device of their choice. Mobile shopping, in particular, is expected to be very strong this year as consumers’ confidence in buying on smartphones or mobile devices continues to grow.”
