This year’s Black Friday came as a much needed relief for a number of UK retailers, and payment data from Ingenico has shown an 11% increase in the number of sales compared to 2018.
As the dust settled on the ‘week-long shopping festival’, the payment solution provider highlighted that this year’s Black Friday saw 86% more transactions than an average Friday, with sales originating from a range of industries, not just the retail sector.
Benoit Boudier, Managing Director, SMB Online Europe from Ingenico, commented: “This Black Friday turned into a week-long event where we processed more transactions for our merchants than ever before.
“With so many purchases being made across the world, and so much at stake, it is crucial that our payment platform has 100% availability – meaning it is completely stable. The last thing merchants want is to lose their ability to process payments, even the loss of just one minute would mean thousands of transactions lost.
“Thanks to the strong Ingenico platform, which has been built to handle twice the amount of the highest recorded peak volume, and the hard work of our Operational and Service Delivery teams that monitor platform performance non-stop, we saw the most successful Black Friday across Europe to-date.”
Average Transaction Value (ATV) saw an increase, now valued at €135. This goes against the current downwards trends which have been ongoing since 2016 – indicating the growing popularity of the event across Europe.
Following the Black Friday rush, Ingenico also saw increased year-on-year sales during Cyber Monday, processing 15% more transactions than in 2018. At midday it was handling 28% more transactions than the same time last year, seeing highs of around 55% more transactions than an average Monday.
Taking a closer look at the performance of individual retailers, Ingenico noted a ‘diverse range’ of sectors that took part in Black Friday.
Speaking with Matias Undurraga, Senior Technology Manager of Just Eat Switzerland, Eat.ch, he explained: “We participated in Black Friday and Cyber Monday since we know that people get very hungry during their online shopping hours. We wanted to help out by providing our customers with an easy checkout and a 20% discount.
“We saw over 35% of our customers applied a discount, and overall Black Friday was one of our top 10 sales days ever.”
Discussing trends of the sales week, Matias said: “We had a trend of early morning customers buying and pre-ordering food for later in the day – and had our best ever day of food collection. Cyber Monday in comparison was slower, we kept our 20% discount but saw fewer redemptions compared to the Friday.”
However, Matthew Rabbitt from Graham & Brown explained that Black Friday was ‘on par’ with 2018. He added: “In the UK we actually had a slightly slower build up to Black Friday, but the day itself was on par with our year-on-year achievements.
“We saw a really strong performance for all other markets – particularly North America – seeing significant growth in both Australia and Germany in comparison to last year, with a 30% increase in each market.”
Matthew added: “We continue to see strong sales across our entire wallpaper range, with spikes in some more seasonal products around this time of year, such as our stag wall art and tartan wallpaper which is performing better than usual.”
