Black Friday has been a much anticipated sales event this year, not least because so many physical stores are shuttered leaving many retailers to focus all of their effort on trading online. Already as of this morning, trading is brisk and traffic to ecommerce sites, and conversion rates for that traffic, is looking extremely healthy.
As you know, many retailers have been extending the concept of Black Friday earlier into November and later into December, so we reviewed statistics for the week leading up to Black Friday YOY to get some early indicators on how things have changed this year.
The periods we compared were Nov 20 to 26, 2020 versus Nov 22 to 28, 2019, which is the seven days leading up to Black Friday in 2019 and 2020. This year there have been a few “whales” which we had to remove from our results so as not to skew statistics: the occasional retailer, for a combination of reasons including closed stores, is doing up to 10 times better than the average. We also surveyed only “established” online businesses who have been trading online for greater than 3 years.
For the period in question, and excluding Black Friday itself, Revenue on average has increased 240%. The number of transactions have increased by 243% and Conversion Rate has increased by 103%. The only statistic that hasn’t improved dramatically (which is inline with results we’ve seen throughout this very unusual year) is Average Order Value, which has actually decreased a touch by -2% for the ecommerce businesses we surveyed.
We look forward to presenting more detailed figures next week when the dust settles, meanwhile we hope you all have an extremely strong and profitable sales event this weekend.