So, Black Friday – Was It Any Good?
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Just like that, it’s all in the past.
Months of preparation and planning lead to a few weeks of frantic trading, then it’s down to the analysis of what actually just happened. In the lead-up to Black Friday and peak more generally, every year people start looking at the forecasts and trying to second-guess what’s on the cards this year. Problem is, Black Friday is such a vast event it pulls in huge numbers of retailer participants, firing out marketing comms through every channel conceivable and its scale is just not like any other sale period in the calendar.
Black Friday: A Marathon, Not a Sprint
It also goes on for a long time. Although ‘Black Friday’ sounds like it is just a single day, that was only true for a very short time in the UK; it soon swelled to include the weekend following, then week leading into it, then the month of November and even into October in some cases now (electrical retailers in particular, here’s looking at you).
So the answer to whether it was any good as a trading period has to factor all that in. You don’t truly know until Christmas really, as a late surge in ordering can help mitigate any shortcomings earlier in the peak season.
Even so, by this point you generally get a feel for whether trading has been positive or not and, while we do have the revenue growth figures for Black Friday and the month of November and both were positive, declaring victory is a bit more complicated than that this year.
The YoY Conundrum: Why Black Friday 2024 is Hard to Measure
The biggest issue is the date of Black Friday (the day) this year, which was on 29th November whereas last year it was on 24th. This pushes it back a week in the tracking, so the year-on-years (YoY) are not proper like-for-likes due to the variance in proximity of the weeks in November to Black Friday this year and last. It’s very confusing and technical for peak this year, but if you work in ecommerce I’ll assume you’ve become well versed in it by now.
The early weeks of November were negative YoY, then the big swings – which were heavily, heavily skewed – came in the final two weeks. For w/c 17th November, the ecommerce market declined -22%, a massive tumble and a growth rate not seen since the pandemic lockdowns. However, this was comparing a week last year that contained Black Friday, to a week this year that did not – hence the skew. The following week, w/c 24th November, the reverse was true, so it contained Black Friday this year but was being compared to a week that didn’t last year.
The result? Positive growth to the tune of +30%.
Big, unreliable and indecipherable skews to one side, November was up – so surely that is enough to declare it a good period? Quite possibly, early suggestions are that it was a good one, the first positive growth on Black Friday since 2020 no less, but looking beneath the surface reveals some nuance.
Peering Through the Dust: Was It a Decent Peak for eCommerce?
Revenue was positive, all product categories saw growth at various points across the peak week, conversion held up well, as did ABV. The thing that seems to have held it back from being a very good period was a slightly subdued performance for traffic to sites.
Even this was still an improvement on where it has been for the past three Black Fridays though. Possibly when the dust settles we might be able to reflect on a decent period for ecommerce, relatively speaking and compared to where it has been over the past three years more generally.
But until we see the full figures it all remains a bit…possibly.
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