UK e-tail sees Black Friday spike as shoppers switch to mobile

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Nov 28, 2017

UK online spending beat forecasts on Black Friday with an 11.7% increase compared to the 9% growth that had been expected for the day.

Thats according to stats from IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group), which also said that smartphones played a major part in the day’s success. While smartphones have been key as a research tools for several years, this time as much as 39% of the spend was completed on a phone, with the device taking the highest share of sales against desktop and tablet. 

While this is not the first time phones have accounted for the highest share, IMRG said it is unusual given Friday was a standard working day, which means people were shopping on their phones even when they might had access to traditional computers at work.

That's perhaps no surprise given that some retailers skewed discounts towards smartphones. Yoox, for instance, offered mobile and app-only discounts at the weekend.

The stronger-than-expected performance overall for the day was achieved in spite of a number of factors that could have had a negative influence on growth such as it being quite early in November this year and therefore occurring before payday.

Additionally, the fact that businesses in multiple other sectors now run their own Black Friday campaigns, hasn’t yet started to divert spend away from retail. And the launch of Black Friday campaigns in the week or two before the day itself may have reportedly dented physical store footfall, but it didn’t hurt online shopping.

IMRG said that final factor is the key one. Throughout November, it was tracking 210 retailers and saw a spike in the number of those who were actively promoting Black Friday-specific discounting campaigns throughout Black Friday week.

The number running Black Friday specific campaigns peaked on the Friday at 168. However, at the beginning of the week there were already 77 actively promoting Black Friday campaigns (as well as 37 running their own discount campaigns), with that number increasing sharply on both Wednesday and Thursday. 

While the Wednesday marked the day of the week when activity started to really accelerate as many switched on their campaigns, this was not reflected in the sales growth for that day, which was up just 2.8%, by far the lowest rate for any day that week.