Black Friday and Cyber Monday Predictions 2017

Black Friday 2017 falls on on November 24, and Cyber Monday on November 27th in the US, the day after Thanksgiving, and analysts already making deal predictions ahead of the buggest eCommerce sale dates of the holiday season. 

Big Stats

• According to Market Watch, in the first few hours of Black Friday, Amazon had sold over 100,000 children’s toys and Target was selling 3,200 televisions per minute.
• According to NRF 137.4 million Americans are planning to shop during Thanksgiving weekend.
• According to NRF, 108.5 million Americans shopped online over the long weekend, millions above above the 99.1 million who hit stores physically.

How do you get a piece of this lucrative sale pie? You don’t need to have deep pockets like the Walmart(s) or the Amazon(s) of the world, or undercut your bottom line too heavily. Here are the strategies the globe’s most successful brands are using at their core.

Mobile Optimization

$3.34 billion in online sales occurred on Black Friday 2016, according to Market Watch, with $1.2 billion from people using mobile devices to complete their purchase. iPads and Samsung 4K TVs were the most popular purchases from the mobile platform, proving that for many consumers: there’s never enough screens. 

Running an omnichannel eCommerce operation is especially important on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when consumers are often away from home or at work, and want to be able to check out the best deal and trends from the device that is most convenient to them. Make sure to test and test again the entire checkout process of your site on every device for user experience, speed and ease. 

Is Black Friday Waning in Relevance?

Some have said that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are no longer the “official” start of the holiday buying season, with November 1 seeing more deals from retailers every year, increasing the “earlier is better” mentality. But, James Miller, of Experian Marketing Services, says “there is little doubt Black Friday has dramatically changed the way people shop in the run-up to Christmas and has created an expectation of deep discounts that arguably did not exist before.”

So, Black Friday and Cyber Monday can be a bit of a double edged sword if you do not run on a system that provides ROI on its own. When your eCommerce operations are generating low operating costs and high productivity, you brand can take more liberties to entice customers with competitive deals on these high-powered days of the year. 

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