Black Friday has only really been in the UK for a few years now, properly coming over from the US in 2013 when ASDA (a subsidiary of Walmart) announced its “Walmart Black Friday by ASDA” campaign, promoting the American Black Friday in the UK.
In 2015, Black Friday broke records in the UK for spending. Here are some of the key figures that we gathered during our research:
- Black Friday saw over 1.1 billion sales in the UK, which was up from £810 million in 2014.
- Cyber Monday saw £968 million sales, which was an increase of 34% from 2014. Online traffic was also 60% higher than on a normal day.
- Black Friday 2015 was the biggest day for online shopping ever in the UK.
- 1/5 of UK retailer websites crashed at sometime during the day. The John Lewis, House of Fraser and Argos sites all went down at least once, which shows how many people were shopping online last year.
- 47% of online sales were from mobile devices, which is up 15% on 2014.
So what about 2016? We definitely think sales are going to soar even more this year, but perhaps not so much in actual stores. Just from looking on the internet early this morning, we saw that major shopping areas in the UK aren’t as busy as expected. The Bullring in Birmingham opened 3 hours early for this special retail day, however turnout was disappointing. This could drastically change throughout the day, and we’re sure there are places that will get extremely busy, but we really predict the focus to be online and for last year’s £968 million sales to be smashed.