UK online shoppers spent a total of £1.23 billion on online retail websites on Black Friday last week, which represents an 12.2% increase compared to Black Friday in 2015 but is below the original forecast growth of 16%, British e-commerce association IMRG said.
Although the number of visitors to e-retail websites on Black Friday continued to grow this year, the actual growth in sales revenue was held back by a lower-than-expected increase in the percentage of those visitors converting to buyers, IMRG explained.
By contrast, each of the four days leading up to Black Friday (Monday 21 – Thursday 24 November) generated strong sales growth of between 23.4% and 33.7%, with the increases in conversion rate being much higher than that of Black Friday.
For the week as a whole (Monday 21 – Monday 28 November 2016), an estimated £6.45 billion was spent on UK online retail sites which is 4.8% below the original forecast of £6.77bn. “Longer campaign durations, with new discounting deals promoted each day, served to spread the peak shopper spend over a longer period,” IMRG said.
The estimates are based on UK online retail sales data from IMRG and online retail site traffic volume data from SimilarWeb.
Looking ahead, IMRG predicted that £7 billion could be spent online during the week of the Black Friday peak period in 2017.
Justin Opie, managing director at IMRG, said: “Over the past few years, Black Friday has consistently demonstrated a remarkable capacity for shifting in terms of size and scale. In 2014 the volume of orders exceeded forecast by over 30%, in 2015 we had empty shops and this year it seems to have become a genuinely extended period of heightened sales activity – taking place over a week (and more in some cases), which is not entirely dissimilar to the way that Xmas peak used to be online before Black Friday disrupted the established pattern in 2014.”
Nitzan Tamari, VP Marketing at SimilarWeb, commented: “In terms of traffic on both desktop and mobile to the shopping category in the UK, we are seeing a jump of 52% on Black Friday and 81% for the four days leading up to Black Friday compared to 2015. While the overall growth in traffic is consistent with the general year over year growth in the category, it’s interesting that when you compare the traffic on the actual day versus the day before, you see a smaller jump this year. This indicates that retailers are creating enticing offerings earlier and consumers are feeling less pressure to buy on just one day.”
