Shopping Holidays trends - 2017

So, the big November is over. It was a very busy month, with so many big online sales events. November always brings huge excitement to both sides - the customers and retailers/ e-tailers. 

This month is particularly interesting because it highlights very positive or negative trends in the market, and gives a view of what is coming.

In recent years, and especially this year, these sales events have been particularly exciting for e-commerce professionals, mainly due to the meteoric rise of online sales. I was very intrigued to see how consumers would behave during the week of Black Friday & Cyber Monday, after countless stories during the year about "the death of the shopping Malls" and how the e-Commerce is smashing the retail, etc. ... Will they prove that the retail is still alive?

This year we saw a strengthening of the trend that retailers are advertising their deals before Black Friday. Most of them - about a week before Black Friday. Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and Target began to release specific deals by early November. The Black Friday's sales can no longer be measured as a one day sales event. It spreads over many days.

This year we have an 18% increase in sales on Black Friday. I think that if next year’s retailers such as Macy's and others will adopt the way of releasing the deals earlier then within 2 years we will measure the sales of the entire month of November, and not only a few single day events.

Another interesting trend is the strengthening of sales on the day before the Black Friday - Thanksgiving Day.

On Thanksgiving Day, online sales totalled $ 2.87 billion, up from $ 1.9 billion in 2016. On Black Friday, online sales totalled $ 5.03 billion, an increase of 17% compared to 2016. 

Mobile Shopping

Another interesting trend is the continued strengthening of completing purchase through the smartphone. About 42% of Black Friday purchases were made via smartphone or tablet. Only 49% of purchases were made via desktop or laptop. This is the first year that the percentage of desktop + laptop purchases has fallen below 50%.

The impact of e-commerce on store traffic

There was a 1% to 1.5% decrease in customer traffic to stores on Black Friday, which is a relatively small gap, and shows that Retail still constitutes a significant factor in holiday sales. However, when there is a huge increase in traffic and sales, and the whole increase comes from online sales, the trend is clear.

If you connect Black Friday with Thanksgiving, there is a 4% drop in traffic to the stores. This is the result of many promotions published on Thanksgiving Day (more significantly than in previous years, when they waited for Black Friday itself), and in fact allowed the Americans to fill their turkey comfortably in the kitchen while adding items to the shopping cart through their smartphones.

Shopping celebration

The sales turnover for the weekend was $ 680 billion (according to the National Retail Federation), including the retail and online stores.

Cyber Monday was the biggest sales day ever in online sales in the US, with sales of $ 6.59 billion (!), Up 16.8% from last year.

According to SaleCyle, weekend online sales totaled $ 16.74 billion, compared with $ 12.75 billion last year.

Again, traffic on shopping sites via mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) was particularly noticeable, with 47.4% of site entries made through these devices.

Best sellers & Discounts

The best sellers were game consoles, games for consoles (Super Mario Odyssey was the leader), Apple Airpods (apparently the best-selling item), Amazon Echo (few models) and Google Chromecast. For kids the best sellers were PJ Masks and Hachimals. 

Black Friday had the highest average discount on televisions (average discount of 21.6%), toys (average discount of 17.3%) and laptops (15.9%).

The highest sales on Cyber Monday were between 8PM to 11PM

Another interesting fact is that customers preferred to buy on a desktop computer on the large retailers websites, and preferred to purchase more via smartphones from small and medium businesses (on their websites or in their stores in the marketplaces).

I think that this is mainly because the large retailers have focused less on individual items, and this year they have made more discounts on the whole website or on a whole category, and browsing their site is still more convenient on desktop version. In single product deals, it is more convenient and fun to purchase fast via smartphone.

So what do we understand?

Online sales are growing fast. The retail chain is not dead, it will continue to be dominant, but more and more customers are going online.

Some retailers already understood, and the rest are beginning to understand now, that in the world of e-commerce, the customer's desire to purchase whenever and where ever he wants, rather than on one focused sales day, forces him to sleep in a tent near the store door to catch the best deals.

Shopping days that became a month's celebration 

The targeted sales days become a sales week, and in some cases, a month-long shopping celebration. In addition, all the traditional retailers that sell online must face new challenges.

In the past, most of their deployment was in favor of increased inventory acquisition, the arrangement of stores, and the increase in manpower in the physical stores ahead of these sales days, now the preparations are also logistical, because they receive a huge amount of online orders in a short period of time and must be sent to customers quickly because customers are not ashamed to Flood their customer service and social networking pages. This is another arena. Not a new one for them, but at a different pace than they have known to date.

Murphy's Law and Shopping Celebration

Like with every celebration, Murphy's law worked overtime. For example, he hit the Macy's network, which on Black Friday morning experienced several hours of trouble that caused slow credit card charges, which caused crazy lines in the stores (not because of the number of customers ...) and of course caused a lot of customers to flood the social networks with their frustration, Macy's also faced the social networking scene sooner than expected.

In addition, on Thanksgiving Day, a sponsored link appeared on Google that looked like an innocent referral for a sale on Amazon, but was actually a scam. Users who clicked on the link came to a page that showed a message that appeared to be genuine from Microsoft that the computer had been infected with a virus, and call the Microsoft customer service center to deal with the problem. When the customers called the number that appeared in the ad, the employees of the company who carried out the fraud responded, presented themselves as representatives of Microsoft, and asked $ 150 for solving the problem. Thus the customers left their personal details and credit information in the hands of this company. As soon as it was revealed, Google removed the link.

What about Israel? 

In Israel, the big eCommerce websites experienced much dramatic increase in sales, and some of them mentioned more than 50% increase in sales, comparing to 2016. This makes sense in light of the fact that in Israel only began to treat November as a month of special sales in the last two years.

Top trends for 2018 (my personal opinion): 

* The continued strengthening of the mobile, and eCommerce websites with native mobile app leading customers for purchase in the app. Maybe even for the first time mobile purchases will bypass the desktop? (This will happen to my opinion in 2019, but who knows?) 

* More retailers will release their deals earlier in November.

* Less individual item deals, more store wide/ category wide/ brand wide deals. For now, we will still see the famous "DoorBusters".

* More retailers will adopt and strengthen their Omni Channel strategy.

* Brands will continue to connect directly with the end customer.

* The strengthening of Marketplace business models, including large retailers (such as Walmart, Macy's, etc...)

I look forward to November 2018 to see which trends will come true and which will disappear or change. In today's fast-paced world, we can never know.

Best,

Meni Dahan