Black Friday / Cyber Monday - Recap and Reactions

I have been in Las Vegas all week for Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent while also trying to follow the reactions to #Cyber5.

Here are my rapid reactions based on posts and articles that I am reading:

• Many brands are seeing better than expected numbers, this is great to see with all the news that was circulating prior to this weekend.
• Online sales are still growing.?Maybe not as fast as before, but that should be expected post Covid. We are seeing many trends from the Covid period remain and shopper behavior changing.
• Coupons and deals drive sales.?You need to go in with a plan. One that includes pricing and promotions.?For those that want to argue this, answer a question for me.?If you were at the mall and you walked by a store that didn’t have any deals promoted and every other store did, how likely would you be to go in?
• Finally, I am constantly reminded that we are in the right place and it’s the right time!?I love this industry and community!

亚马逊 ’s reaction called this “a record-breaking holiday shopping weekend”.

Some highlights include:

• The best-selling categories were Home, Fashion, Toys, Beauty, and Amazon Devices.
• Customers supported small businesses this holiday shopping weekend, generating more than $1 billion in sales for small businesses in the U.S.
• The best-selling items on Amazon were Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick, and Apple AirPods. Other top sellers included Hasbro Gaming CONNECT 4, Burt’s Bees Christmas Gifts, apparel from Champion, apparel and shoes from New Balance, the Amazon smart plug, Echo Show, and Nintendo Switch.
• Customers bought millions of Amazon Devices, including Echo, Ring, Blink, Kindle, and Fire TV products.
• Some of the top sellers from small businesses included games like What Do You Meme?, Taco vs Burrito, and Kids Against Maturity.

Here is how our community has been reacting:

Alexander Swade from Thrasio shared “Our expectations were just crushed! And I mean that in the most positive way possible.” He also shared a few learnings and things to keep an eye on over the next few days. Based on a company press release, they sold 2 million units over the five-day period, pretty impressive.

Melissa Burdick from Pacvue is trying to coin a new phrase “cart squatting”, as she has the data the show that shoppers were indeed looking for deals.?Cart Squatting is when you place an item in your cart and wait to see if the price changes or a coupon is released.?I have seen this behavior in the past, so it doesn’t surprise me, but I always love when we can see data to prove trends.?

As Laura Meyer from Envision Horizon reminds us with growth comes challenges.?Many experienced delays in data from Amazon ads over the holiday weekend.?Jacob Snelson from OneStone reminds us that in these situations you need to trust your plan going into a peak spend and sales season, and stick to it.

Liran Hirschkorn from Incrementum Digital saw that overall sales were stronger this year versus last, Acos was slightly better and Conversion rate up over last 30 days with a 16% increase but down slightly from last year.

Florian Nottorf from ADFERENCE checks in to share what he is seeing from the German marketplaces.?Florian dives in to what we were told “Shoppers are not in a mood to buy…”And what he was seeing, AOV increased (+38%) and Ad revenue tripled (+173%). So what can we learn from these findings?

John Ghiorso from Media.Monks shares that overall consumer behavior trends are shifting.?Some of the trends we saw from Covid are sticking around. It's possible that the online/offline dynamic normalized for every day shopping, but maintained a significant shift to online for holiday shopping. ?Only time will tell.

So, do you need to run coupons to drive sales on high traffic events like Cyber 5??According to Paul Harvey, no.?Simply send TikTok traffic to your listing. But if you don’t have a social presences Joe Shelerud shows that deals can make a huge impact on your sales.

Are you looking for ways to measure success for your brand??

Check out these data points and tools that have some data to help you tell the story to your boss.

• Amazon Turkey 5 Leaderboard – a comprehensive free dashboard from John Shea and the team at Momentum Commerce
• Cyber5 Power Ranking - This list looks at the biggest gainers in #amazon sales rank over the weekend. Mike Black from Profitero shares themes he is seeing.
• Amazon Cyber 5 Recap – is a report by department identifying top performing brands by sales, advertising activity, promotional engagement, etc. Nathan Rigby from Analytic Index highlights a few finds, download the full report to get more.
• The Prime Times - Brian Dao from Incrementum Digital breaking down Black Friday Amazon data in this newsletter. I also suggest you subscribe.
• Infographic – I thought that Envision Horizon did a great job of visually displaying some of the numbers from this past weekend.

More Recaps

• Global Overview shares discount types that worked as well as other data points from this years Turkey 5.
• Bobsled Marketing shared how Turkey 5 shook out for their client partners including Kiri Masters ' 7 key finding.
• Channel Key LLC provides a recap of the revenue, trends and client data.
• Perpetua does a deep into Amazon Ad performance over the holiday weekend.
• Curious how orders get to your shoppers door? Amazon provides some insight.
• Liran Hirschkorn digs into Cyber Monday data providing his take on the day.
• Flywheel saw their biggest Cyber 5 ever with attributed sales up 6% YoY–sales growth was driven by attributed ASP which increased 15%. YoY.

Did I miss your recap?

Let me know by posting a link to it in the comments or send me a DM.

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