Black Friday Shopping Stats Revealed

Monday, December 9, 2019 - 19:56 by David Aiken

In the week following the Black Friday weekend, various sources have published figures which delve into the consumer habits that emerged over the course of the year’s biggest retail sales event.

A study from Poq demonstrated that e-commerce apps on smartphones were more widely used to carry out safe shopping online than in any previous year, with time spent on these services more than doubling in 2019.

Furthermore, it was found that while plenty of shoppers switched between platforms before committing to a purchase, apps took up more time on average for a typical multichannel audience.

Analysts expect that if this trajectory continues, shopping apps will be able to pull in more cash than desktop sites by the time that Black Friday rolls around again in 2020.

Another interesting statistic reported in the wake of Black Friday is that people in Central London were the most ardent users of e-commerce services, committing to more online purchases than consumers in other parts of the country.

The report, published by the Royal Mail, found that the other areas in which online shopping was proportionally most popular included Kirkwall in Scotland and Llandrindod Wells over in Wales.

One further study, this time coming from NMPi, proved that Black Friday was a bumper period for plenty of retailers across the country, with site traffic almost tripling while revenues more than quadrupled in many cases.

Part of this was achieved thanks to better conversion rates than in the past, while almost three-quarters of all site visits originated from mobile devices. This shows that desktops now have a far slenderer slice of the action, even if they tend to fare better in terms of actually being used by consumers to go through with transactions, suggesting a trust issue exists in the mobile realm.