Qubit: UK Black Friday Online Spend 4X That of an Average Friday as Shoppers Stay at Work to Take Part in Sales from Their Office Computers; Black Friday Phenomenon 100% Bigger Year on Year

Online shoppers started early with a surge between the hours of
8-10am, most of them browsing for goods on a mobile or tablet but then
switching to a computer or laptop to order and purchase

LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Black Friday, the traditional US sales bonanza that follows
Thanksgiving, cemented itself as an online institution in the UK
yesterday.

While the stampedes of in-store visitors failed to materialise, UK
consumers started early and spent nearly 4X the amount they do on an
average Friday according to Qubit, which delivers data-first customer
experiences to more than 200 ecommerce businesses globally including 35
of the top 100 UK retailers.

Black Friday UK online traffic was 2.5X higher than an average Friday
and there were about 2X the number of orders, while spend was 3.8X
higher.

Retailers witnessed about the same number of purchases per customer as
an average Friday, although the average value of each order across these
retailers was up by 88% per customer.

And on a day when online buying was preferred to in-store shopping,
customers ditched their increasing preference for mobile devices. The
split of traffic across devices didn’t change much on Black Friday
compared with an average day, with 49% of page views coming from
computers, 32% from mobile and 19% from tablets.

However, on Black Friday people were much more likely to switch away
from their mobile to actually make their purchases. Whereas on an
average Friday, 51% of online orders were on a mobile, only 37% of them
were on Black Friday. The majority of the ordering activity moved to
computers with 43%, compared to the usual 32%.

The same was true for spend, with only 22% of orders on mobile, compared
to the 28% for a normal Friday.

Looking at the times of day that Black Friday sales took place, there
may be a good reason why computers dominated mobile on Black Friday.

An early morning ‘rush’ saw 12% of the day’s online traffic between
8-10am compared to 8% on a normal Friday. For spending the trend was
even more pronounced; 14% of all money was spent between 8-10am,
compared to 7% on a normal Friday. In fact 44% of all money spent was
spent by midday, compared to 26% on a regular Friday.

There is perhaps evidence that office workers saved themselves a day’s
holiday spent fighting for the most in-demand goods in store and instead
exploited the sales promotions from their desks at work.

In addition, mobile shoppers tend to buy fewer items and have smaller
order sizes generally. While there is evidence of a general increase in
customers using their mobiles to shop, people perhaps still prefer to
buy big-ticket purchases that require more consideration on a computer
as the experience for this kind of purchase still may not be right on
smaller screens.

The 2015 Black Friday figures dwarfed those of 2014, when traffic was
1.9X, orders 1.4X and spend 1.9X of an average Friday.

Additional resources:
www.qubit.com

About Qubit

Qubit is the pioneer in delivering data-first customer experiences. We
count 35 of the top 100 retailers in the UK among our 200+ Enterprise
clients.

Our digital experience hub integrates analytics, segmentation, A/B
testing, and web personalization with the Visitor Cloud, a real-time
data supply chain connecting data across all your brand touchpoints
through a single view of the customer. This infrastructure allows
marketers to run powerful personalisations at scale involving multiple
data sources, and it supports custom development by your engineering
team.

Qubit has been recognized by Forrester as a marketing-centric technology
with “proprietary, best-in-breed offering” for web and mobile analytics
as well as testing and optimization. We’re trusted to deliver real
impact to the bottom line for the biggest brands in ecommerce including
TOPSHOP, Uniqlo, John Lewis, Hilton Hotels, Jimmy Choo, bebe, and
Staples.

To date, we have received more than $36 million in funding from Accel
Partners, Balderton Capital, and Salesforce Ventures.

Qubit
Deliver your big ideas.
www.qubit.com

Contacts

UK Media Contact
Qubit
Mark Choueke, +44 7832 139827
Global
Communications Director
mark@qubit.com
–
Please
call or email Mark direct for further data or to speak to Qubit’s CEO
and founder Graham Cooke