This year’s Black Friday is now over, but how did it do?
Amazon UK reported busiest day on record this year. The website had orders of over 5.5 million, with 64 items being sold per second. This beats last year’s record of 4 million items sold for the UK e-retailer and shows the growing popularity of Black Friday in the UK.
“Ever since we introduced Black Friday to the UK in 2010, sales have increased year-on-year but this year really has surpassed all of our expectations.
“The public’s appetite for Black Friday has been bigger than ever, kicking off the Christmas shopping period in earnest and establishing Black Friday as a fixture on the UK Christmas shopping calendar.”
John Lewis also saw an increase in website traffic this year compared to last with a 307% rise compared to 2013. They reported that the most popular items sold that day were iPad minis and food processors. Other retailers, such as PC World had website traffic ‘increasing five fold from last year’. Many retailers, such as Curry’s, had to place queues on their websites because their servers were overloaded with waits of over 30 minutes long. Other websites that struggled with server demand were TescoDirect, Argos and John Lewis.
As well as online, many physical retailers also sold a large amount of goods. Asda sold 8000 televisions in an hour and over a thousand BMXs by 9am.
Black Friday’s getting bigger every year in the UK, showing the increasing popularity of pre-Christmas sales.
