As the Christmas season draws closer, some of the biggest shopping events of the year are coming up and continue to smash records.
Alibaba’s $7 Billion Singles’ Day Sales
China’s Singles’ Day falls on the 11th of November each year, and is celebrated as an “anti-valentine’s day” for single people to purchase gifts for themselves. It mirrors Cyber Monday as one of China’s biggest online retail sales days of the year.
One of China’s retail giants, Alibaba, far exceeded expectations this year and sold “$2bn (£1.2bn) of goods in the first hour.” It went on to sell $6.96billion (£4.4bn) worth of goods in seventeen hours with “analysts predicting that sales could surpass $8bn this year.”
Compared to 2013, Alibaba recorded sales of $5.75bn and shipped over 150 million packages. The sales for online retailers are increasing annually and show no signs of slowing down, so what can we expect for this year’s Black Friday?
Black Friday UK
Black Friday is one of America’s biggest shopping events having grown in popularity with the advent of eCommerce and boasts new records every year.
It meant little to the UK until Amazon.co.uk had a week long Black Friday sale in 2010. Last year, supermarket chain Asda boosted the popularity of the American event by running “flash promotions within stores.” cutting prices of tablets, tvs and drills. This year, analysts expect Black Friday is to “set new records for online sales”.
Not only will it break records, but it’s set to change shopping habits as well:
“Andy Street, the managing director of John Lewis, has said Black Friday will be ‘huge’ this year. Street claimed Black Friday has brought some Christmas spending forward and also highlights how many people are now using their smartphones and tablets to shop. On Black Friday last year, traffic to JohnLewis.com peaked between 7am and 8am at levels 14 times higher than anything the department store retailer had seen before.
Mark Lewis adds, “Black Friday has definitely become one of the key dates in the UK’s shopping calendar. Following steady growth over the last few years, Black Friday really emerged in the UK in 2013, when we saw the day break our previous records for a single day’s online trade. Now that customers are aware of the date and expecting it, we anticipate that this year’s Black Friday will be bigger still. Black Friday is changing the way our customers plan their Christmas shopping and we expect this year will see it come of age in the retail calendar.”
With each year breaking records and with 2014 looking no different, it’s no wonder that many retailers, both online and physical, are taking advantage of pre-Christmas sales.
