After Black Friday’s pitched supermarket battles over discounted TVs and domestic gadgets, the retail frenzy moves online to a day the industry has christened Cyber Monday, with nearly £650m expected to be spent with the click of a mouse.
Retailers have turned this weekend into a multibillion-pound shopping marathon as promotions target pre-Christmas pay packets. “Black Friday now marks the start of the online shopping season,” said Tina Spooner, chief information officer at online retail trade body IMRG, who said it could be another record-breaking Christmas for online retailers as shopping habits change.
The Christmas shopping season started with a bang on Friday with police being called to Tesco supermarkets around the country after store staff were overwhelmed by mobs of shoppers trying to bag discounted TVs and appliances when sales started at midnight.
Shopping centres reported huge increases in shopper numbers as high street anchors including John Lewis, House of Fraser and Marks & Spencer waded in, offering discounts on winter clothing and gadgets such as iPads.
Argos’s chief operating officer, David Robinson, said the whole weekend was going to be a huge sales event as it, along with other retailers, ran deals over several days to appeal to shoppers who had just been paid. “There is a reason for Black Friday in the States – because it is the day after Thanksgiving,” he said. “Here it is because it is around the last pay day before Christmas.”
While many Britons are expected to start their Christmas shopping by visiting stores, a growing number will shop from their sofas, with about £1.5bn expected to be spent online over the weekend. Late on Thursday evening and on Friday the virtual high street was showing signs of strain as shopper numbers forced retailers including Tesco, Argos and Currys to lock browsers out of their sites until the tens of thousands of people already shopping had logged off. In some instances potential customers were asked to wait in online queues for more than an hour just to start browsing. IT experts said that tomorrow, when 125m website hits in 24 hours are predicted, could be another flashpoint for frustrated consumers and retailers who risk losing sales.
Amazon reported that Friday was the busiest day ever on its UK website, with more than 5.5 million items ordered at a rate of 64 items a second, beating its previous record on Cyber Monday 2013 of 4.1 million items.
Michael Allen of internet experts Dynatrace said retailers’ websites were vulnerable because they often relied on the same third-party computer servers around the country to host content such as images. “These websites are incredibly complex beasts,” he said. “When you get these unprecedented increases in traffic, these third parties get hammered as well. If these third parties fail, the retailers fail.” Some analysts think discounting is already more prevalent on the high street this year. Fashion retailers are trying to coax Britons into buying winter coats and jackets, despite the recent mild weather.
PwC, the accountants, said 59 out of 100 stores it regularly monitors were having sales or advertising promotions in shop windows, compared with 55 last year. The average discount on offer was just shy of 40%.
“The current level of promotional activity shows the impact the very mild weather in September and October has had on clothing retailers,” said David Oliver, retail partner at PwC. “This is a big factor influencing retailers’ promotional decisions, outweighing the fact that consumers have a little more money in their pockets. It remains to be seen what influence Black Friday and Cyber Monday may have, but we expect the traditional annual game of ‘chicken’ between consumers and retailers to go all the way to the wire.”
