The fighting, the screaming, the pushing, the hair-pulling, all in pursuit of that one great bargain are the scenes we expect to see on the biggest shopping day of the year, Black Friday. This year, however, it seems frantic clicking has taken over. The good old fashion high streets around the country were quieter than expected, with customers instead choosing to search for their cheap deals online.
Amazon, the second largest online retailer in the world, had their biggest ever sales day, shipping more than six million items. This is an increase of almost 10% on last year, when they were selling at a rate of 64 items per second. Amazon managed to deal with the heavy traffic online, but for some retailers, the demand was too high with reported errors and checkout problems common. The websites of Argos and John Lewis both crashed during the day, potentially costing them millions of pounds in lost sales. This may not be overly surprising, as Amazon was created specifically for online shopping and has been operational for twenty years – spending the last decade as the online retailer of choice in the UK and USA. On the other hand, a department store such as John Lewis, which is based so much on its actual physical stores, has not had that wealth of experience and growth online, so will always be playing catch up.
Interestingly, the most popular way to browse through bargains online was using mobile devices, with 54.4% off all traffic. This is an increase of 16.6% from last year. However, it seems that consumers are still more confident actually making that purchase on a desktop device, as only 35.3% of sales were completed on mobile devices. If retailers want to compete with the likes of Amazon, they will need to provide a quick, simple, secure and stable platform that gives the consumer confidence in their shopping experience, starting from basic browsing, and lasting all the way to the checkout.
