After more hype than a Vegas title fight and a copious amount of huffing and blowing from the powers that run the high street, Black Friday has come and gone. And as the whole shebang is over bar the shouting, the bean counters have their abaci out and are voraciously totting up the numbers. It looks like the final score is High Street 1 eCommerce 5.Headlines are flying around and as always there are conflicts, but the overall feeling is that the high street is down, and online shopping is becoming the dominant force for Black Friday and Christmas shopping. Some retailers did well, John Lewis are reporting record sales for the Black Friday weekend, but most are bemoaning the rise of the internet and although foot fall is up sales are not matching the scale of digital competition.

In our previous blog, we predicted that for online merchants who chose to sit out the discounting madness, there would probably be a surge in sales as fallout from the vast increase in traffic. Looking at the StoreFeeder dashboard and drilling down it seems that was entirely the case. Most of the merchants we work with saw huge spikes last Friday and across the weekend whether they were discounting or not. Looking at the pie charts it is evident that merchants taking advantage of the Amazon marketplace had a bumper weekend to say the least.So, what now? We are on the final furlong towards Christmas and most UK workers will have been paid this week. ‘A Fairy-tale of New York’ has been playing in the supermarkets for about three weeks now and it is fair to say that shoppers are keen to get the Christmas shopping done. We will be keenly looking at the numbers and weighing this coming weekend up against last weeks. Maybe today is white Friday….? Maybe this weekend will see spikes that match last weeks? Only time will tell, and we’ll no doubt have something to say about it in the next blog. Until then, happy shopping.