Black Friday sees boom in pre-Christmas sales

Black Friday was everywhere. Before, during and after this powerful day of pre-Christmas sales we saw discounts on training courses (with reduced registration fees), on tickets for shows, on bank products, on bus tickets, on flights, on mobile apps and games, on beauty treatments, on the lottery… An online loans company even offered credit to enable shopping. What’s more, it saw Apple changing their marketing strategy! Previously reluctant to offer large discounts on this day, this year they had offers on several (older) products, including their star product: the iPhone (which they had never done before).

Forecasts more than met

Last year was the first really strong ‘Black Friday’ in Spain, but the 2016 campaign improved on results: according to Adigital (Asociación Española de la Economía Digital, or Spanish Digital Economy Association), this year saw more than 1,400 million euros in sales (offline and online), with the most frequent offers being discounts on catalogue products. Retailers saw a 20% increase in orders over last year.

And if we take a look at Amazon, who broke their sales record in 2015, we see that this year they did it again: more than 940,000 products sold in 24 hours, an average of 10 articles per second.

Undoubtedly clients made big inroads into their Christmas shopping, pocketing large savings at the same time: data from the Worten-Gfk Black Friday Observatory show that 67% of Spaniards took advantage of the event to shop early. Even so, there are still a lot of presents to be acquired, and many consumers will continue their Christmas shopping throughout the month of December.

Of course here at LINK Mobility we also saw the positive side of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Our Spanish clients have communicated an average increase of 30% over last year, with a 20% increase in volume of traffic. This means that during the month of November 40 million SMS were sent, and more than 500 million emails.

In short, Black Friday is gaining more and more followers, even becoming a marker that shows the state of our economy. And this year it looks like we are in good health.