With Cyber Monday still in full swing, UK e-commerce over the Black Friday weekend and coming days is tipped to exceed £3 billion, according to Visa Europe.
Black Friday was defined by lower football in bricks and mortar stores, but it seems consumers made a shift towards e-commerce, with Experian’s £1.1 billion estimate in overall sales easily met.
It’s a 36% year-on-year boost on 2014’s takings, and demonstrates that the US-bred shopping date is set to be a key fixture in the UK retail calendar.
James Miller, senior retail consultant at Experian, urges retailers to be prepared for record consumer interest in the coming weeks.
“Consumers now see online shopping as a leisure activity, with pre-Christmas discount retail events such as Black Friday driven by this.”
Experian predicts that Cyber Monday, occurring today (November 30) - traditionally when consumers look for more online shopping deals – will see another £943 million in purchases: up 31% on last year.
US saw mobile success
Across the Atlantic, Black Friday sales took an overall dip to $10.4 billion – a decrease of 10% from 2014, according to ShopperTrak.
But once again, it was a victory for e-commerce, which saw sales take a punchy increase of over 21%, with Adobe reporting that email promotions drove 25% more sales than last year.
Additionally, IBM’s Black Friday report 2015 shows mobile to have soared in the busiest week for US retail, accounting for 60% of all online traffic on Thanksgiving. That figure only dropped to 57% on Black Friday itself, where average order values on tablet “eclipsed” that of desktop for the first time, at $136.42 to $134.06.
On the other hand, smartphone shoppers spent just $121 per order.
But while mobile sales witnessed a year-on-year increase of 30% and topped the leaderboard in traffic, desktop – with its larger screen real estate – ultimately came up trumps, taking nearly two thirds of sales (64%).