£1.27bn to be spent online today in Black Friday sales bonanza
Experts estimate around £1.27bn will be spent online at UK retail sites today, an increase of 16% on last year's official Black Friday.
According to the UK's online retail association IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group), £6.77bn will be spent on UK retail sites during the entire Black Friday sales period, which it denotes as running from Monday 21 November to Monday 28 November. Significantly 51% of those sales will be made on mobile devices with smartphones outperforming tablets for the first time and accounting for £1.83bn of total sales.
Last year on the official Black Friday online sales hit £1.1bn, which was the peak day for purchases. While today's sales are set to be 16% higher, the sales period has been stretched from what was initially a one-day event to a week-long promotional period (or even longer in some cases), as such says IMRG it is difficult to predict if today will be the peak day for purchases this year.
When Black Friday was first imported to the UK from the US in 2010 (it is the day after Thanksgiving in the US), the sales lasted for one day only. By 2014 it had evolved into a long weekend event but now, in a bid to steal a march on each other and to avoid scrambles to the shops and websites in a short space of time, retailers have brought the event forward so that it lasts a week or more.
"Black Friday as an event has shown a remarkable capacity for evolving each year and it seems set to change further this year. How the spend is spread across the days of the week depends on two things. Firstly, while there is no consensus on campaign durations among retailers, some are likely to try launching theirs earlier in the Black Friday week this year to secure their share of spend and steal a march on their competitors," said IMRG managing director Justin Opie.
"The other key factor concerns how shoppers actually respond – how early will they be willing to start their Christmas shopping, will many just wait until the Black Friday day itself, will they respond quickly to campaigns, pulling order volumes forward from Black Friday and potentially creating new peak days in the process? These are the questions that will shape how this period evolves in 2016," Opie added.
Nitzan Tamari, VP Marketing at SimilarWeb, which supplies IMRG with the sales data, said that last year on Black Friday itself website traffic was up 34% on all other days in the holiday sales period, higher even than Boxing Day which came in at a close second. "We are closely monitoring our desktop and mobile web data both in the UK and globally in order to understand if those trends continue this year, and we look forward to reporting on the Christmas Season shopping results with IMRG in a few weeks," Tamari said.
Yesterday Yoox Net-A-Porter Group (YNAP) revealed that it expected 51% of its sales to come from mobile devices during the Cyber Monday/Black Friday period, which would mark a significant milestone for the group and the luxury industry as a whole.
Image: YNAP courtesy
