Black Friday – not long ago still an insider term – has enjoyed an exponential boom in Europe over the last few years for both high-street and online retailers. Hence, it was with interest that we looked at the online behaviour of our UK behavioural panel in the week of Black Friday. How did visits to online retail websites change just before Black Friday and on the big day itself? For this purpose, we aggregated the data of the most relevant ones (amazon.co.uk, argos.co.uk, asda.com, asos.com, marksandspencer.com, sainsburys.co.uk, tesco.com and waitrose.com). As we can see in the figure below, the number of visits in the UK fluctuated quite a lot in the days before Black Friday, but was on a constant rise until it reached its peak on Black Friday the 27th November with a total increase of 37%. It is interesting to see that not only did the number of visits increase the day itself, which is to be expected, but they are also up the days before, which shows the importance of the precedent period for online retailers. So the purchases show a significant increase: on overall the increased by 54%, for amazon even by 71%.

The results are based on 1 800 panellists in the UK who actively agreed to be part in our behavioural panel and to have their online behaviour tracked by us. Find out more about our behavioural panel here.