Learning from Black Friday

It’s online!

Previously we saw Black Friday as a store event and Cyber Monday was the big day for online deals with people switching their laptops on at 5am to get the best deals before anyone else. This year that was not the case. Retailers had their deals online for Black Friday, the weekend, some opted for the entire week where as others filtered their deals out throughout the month.

Queues for shops were calmer and shorter as the demand to visit stores for deals was less appealing than doing it easily from the comfort of your home. More people are interested in the bargain rather than having the product with them there and then. Shops responded by opening at usual hours with a few opening an hour or two earlier. Gaming stores still managed to keep late night/early morning crowds as many developers release sort after games towards the end of the year.

It’s demanding

It’s no surprise that with the amount of custom comes a high rise of issues. In store you can be met with the most frantic and shocking behaviour and online you could be faced with an enormous amount of traffic causing services to fail. This year saw some of the largest names suffer including Argos, who had just introduced a new same day delivery service which was not altered to compensate for the demand on the day.

It’s not a day.

You would think that Black Friday is just one day but it seems to be taking over the entire month, which is great for the consumer but perhaps not for business owners. The good thing about having your deals on throughout the month is that you ease up the demand on Friday so you can still maintain your delivery service and not over work the warehouse and packaging team on one day, however you run the risk of having small profit gains throughout the months as your items remain discounted for longer.

It’s not for everyone

This year saw a few big retailers not participate in the mass discounting event. Next didn’t promote sales online or in store for example and even more had promoted online only which is demonstrated in Footfall traffic who reported a 4% drop from last year on the high street.