🔥 BFCM Round-up (Winners, Losers & More)

🏙️ Industry News (E-commerce & AI)

• Shares in e-commerce stocks such as Shopify, Etsy & Wayfair all surged on Monday, after strong Black Friday weekend sales. (CNBC)

• In the US, online sales were up 7.5% on Black Friday YoY, while in-store shopping rose 2.1% YoY (Forbes)

• In the UK, weekly footfall was down 12.6% from the peak levels of 2019, showing the long-term shift to online Black Friday shopping. (Reuters)

• The UK, US, Germany, and 15 other countries have signed off new AI guidelines in an agreement to make AI ‘secure by design‘. (Reuters)

• Consumer confidence grew in November, rising by six points to -24. Previously, October had seen a nine-point decline. (The Retail Bulletin)

• Over BFCM weekend, Amazon staff across 30 countries entered into strikes under the slogan ‘Make Amazon Pay‘. It was the biggest demonstration against faced by Amazon in its history. (Mashable)

🥇 Shopify Breaks Black Friday Records

This is huge for Shopify. The headline figure coming out of their camp was that Shopify merchants set a Black Friday record of $4.1 billion in sales.

That equates to an average of $2.8 million spent on Shopify stores every minute on Black Friday.

But the records didn’t just stop at Black Friday. Shopify shared that across the whole Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, total sales hit $9.3 billion (a 24% rise on last year).

After a slow start to festive spending, as reported last week, shoppers have moved up a gear now.

Stats from Shopify BFCM weekend:

• The top trending product categories were: clothing, personal care, and jewellery.

• The average cart price was $110.71

• 15% of all orders were made across borders.

• 61 million consumers purchased from Shopify stores.

• 17,500 entrepreneurs made their first sale.

• More than 55,000 merchants had their best-ever day of sales on Shopify.

• The top-selling countries were the US, UK, and Canada.

• The top-selling cities were LA, New York, and London.

The Outpost’s Opinion: These are great headlines for Shopify. But even more crucially, great headlines for e-commerce sellers. This year, shoppers have been tactical with their spending. It will be interesting to see YoY sales volume in December. Watch this space.

📈📉 Black Friday Traffic Winners & Losers 

Black Friday is all about big products with big discounts.

But, unfortunately for some of the leading retailers, there are some pretty big headlines floating around this week after their Black Friday promotions failed to bring in the shoppers they had hoped for.

We all know that traffic isn’t the be-all and end-all of Black Friday. However, the insights published by the Retail Gazette give a good insight into the popularity of the big retail names at the moment.

The outstanding and unsurprising winner of Black Friday was Temu. The Chinese retailer has seen massive growth in online presence this year, as well as flying high on the App Store.

It all seems to be paying dividends now as they posted an astonishing growth of +74,150% YoY.

Sephora, which only re-launched in the UK in October 2022, was one to watch as well. Their traffic was up an impressive +132% from last year.

On the other hand, PrettyLittleThing and Asos would be concerned with their lack of consumer action last weekend, as both stores saw their traffic down -45% and -43% respectively.

The compiled list of the Black Friday traffic winners and losers is below:

The Outpost’s Opinion: Some surprising results here. Especially looking at the performance of Currys, John Lewis, and even Amazon, who go all out on Black Friday. Boohoo had mixed results, but will be licking their wounds after taking over PrettyLittleThing in 2020; they saw negative traffic scores across both their key fashion brands. But Debenhams, also Boohoo-owned, made a recovery. Possibly a sign of promising things ahead for the once stalwart high-street chain.

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