While Black Friday’s place as a big retail sales day originated in the United States, where retailers in years past used the day after Thanksgiving to kick off their biggest holiday sales, it’s a concept that retailers in the United Kingdom have picked up, and it produced a big lift in online sales this season.
Web sales on Friday, Nov. 28, helped to drive a 20% year-over-year increase in e-commerce in November in the United Kingdom, where Thanksgiving is not a holiday, according to the latest estimates from U.K. e-retail association Interactive Media in Retail Group and technology consultancy Capgemini. Excluding online travel sales, the year-over-year increase was 22%.
“The mania around Black Friday has clearly driven profound sales results in November, in particular in typical ‘Christmas gift’ categories such as gifts, beauty and electronics,” says Adgild Hop, principal, head of retail consulting at Capgemini. “We will need to await the December and January results to determine whether this has been truly incremental or merely earlier (and potentially lower margin) sales.”
The week beginning Nov. 23—which included Thanksgiving in the United States, along with Black Friday—brought a 44% increase in web sales compared with the previous week. Black Friday itself posted a 135% increase in web sales compared with the same day last year.
In all, consumers in the U.K. spent some 12.1 billion pounds ($18.9 billion) in November, the report says.
The entire month of November also produced the highest conversion rate so far this year, 5.3%, “suggesting that online shopping was more purposeful than usual,” says the IMRG Capgemini e-retail Sales Index.
A previous report from IMRG shows that 181 million U.K. consumers spent 810 million pounds ($1.269 billion) online on Black Friday. On Cyber Monday—the Monday after Thanksgiving, Dec. 1— 160.8 million U.K. consumers spent 720 million pounds ($1.128 billion). The data mean Black Friday, for the first time, was a bigger online shopping day in the United Kingdom than Cyber Monday. Historically, the Monday after Thanksgiving has been the bigger online sales day in the United Kingdom, IMRG says. Cyber Monday continues to be the bigger of the two shopping days for online sales in the United States.
The new report also finds that:
• Web sales in November increased 37% compared with October. Excluding travel, the month-over-month increase was 45%.
• Mobile commerce sales increase 80% year over year in November and 48% month over month. During November’s last week, sales via smartphones and tablets increased 82% compared with the previous week.
• Online sales of gifts increased 154% month over month, while health and cosmetics posted a 99% gain and electronics were up 71%.