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2022 Black Friday Ecommerce Strategy & Stats Report – Webinar

2022 Black Friday Ecommerce Strategy & Stats Report – Webinar


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Welcome to the SaleCycle 2022 Black Friday Ecommerce Strategy & Stats Report Webinar, presented by Brad Ward our SEO & Content Manager and author of this report, and Casey Turnbull, our Marketing Executive at SaleCycle.

Watch and listen as we explore key findings of the most recent Black Friday event, so that you can utilise the trends and behaviours from over 409,607,109 online user journeys for this year’s upcoming Black Friday date. You can also find a transcript of the entire webinar below, so you can refer back to the information discussed.

SaleCycle are dedicated to helping ecommerce businesses discover key information, along with expert insights, to improve conversion rates across the board – from abandoned baskets to key buying times – especially during important sales events. 

About This Report [00:00]

BRAD

Hello and welcome to this SalesCycle Webinar. This is going to be about the key findings from Black Friday. The data has been taken from our 2022 Black Friday ecommerce report. 

My name is Brad and I’m the Search and Content Manager and the author of this report and I’m joined by Casey Turnbull, the Ecommerce Marketing Executive and author of The 2022 Fashion Ecommerce Stats and Trends Report.

CASEY

Hi, this is Casey here and as Brad said, we’re going to be talking about:

  • Consumer online habits before, during and after Black Friday.
  • Consumers intent to purchase – and when they actually complete their purchase. 
  • The user journey during Black Friday.
  • The difference between desktop and mobile user journeys and the key stats 
  • And trends throughout the Black Friday period from 2021, so that you can prepare for your 2022 Black Friday event. 

During Black Friday, there’s an opportunity for ecommerce brands to capture more value from their inflated online traffic and recover any browsing sessions or carts that might have been abandoned learning from past events.

BRAD

Yeah, there’s also a major opportunity to collect much more customer data and build a nice sales pipeline to be able to market after Black Friday. As Casey mentioned, there’s going to be a lot more traffic on the site. There’s going to be many more abandoned carts and there’s going to be many more sales – which we’ll go through in the next few slides. 

So this is really a great opportunity to build that pipeline and gain that customer dear to market down the line.

Online Traffic [01:32]

CASEY

So as we’ve changed slides here, we can see that the overall online traffic last year increased by 38% from the start of the week to Black Friday and of this traffic, mobile accounted for 74%.

Peak Times [01:47]

BRAD

Yeah, and on Black Friday, the busiest part of the day for online traffic was 12 noon, but online users really began to increase from around eight o’clock in the morning. You can see that increase from eight o’clock in the morning, all the way up to around lunchtime. So that really shows people’s everyday habits following the Black Friday trend. 

Mobile traffic peaked at around 11am to 12pm, with last year being relatively similar in terms of hybrid working protocols as well. So what we tend to see is that when it comes to mobile, people tend to browse at lunchtimes [for example] and this coincides with online traffic. So we’ve seen a similar pattern this year as well.

CASEY

Yeah, so talking about browsing, the peak time for online traffic from a mobile device was 9pm. However, on desktop, it was 11am. 

So, the ability to browse and buy at later times and throughout the day with a mobile device is obviously significant here. We can see people using their mobile phones during downtime – which tends to be later through the night – and that’s why we’ve got this peak time of traffic here. 

Browse Abandonment Rates [02:26]

And moving on to browse abandonment via device. Ecommerce brands are kicking off their Black Friday deals early, which could explain why the browser abandonment rate reduces over time. So things like early bird discounts could be the cause of this, starting the week before or even earlier in recent Black Friday events, which definitely can be expected this year as well. So brands can benefit from joining in on this trend. And we can see here that it could have a profitable result according to last year.

BRAD

And carrying on with our browse abandonment theme – browse abandonment on Black Friday was around 85%, and this was with traffic at an all time high as well. So we can really see the intent increases, whereas traffic increases as well. So Black Friday really does show high value and does attract high value customers.

Add-To-Cart Rates [03:52]

CASEY

Add to cart rates:  As online sessions grew in the lead up to Black Friday, so did the amount of carts created. So on Black Friday in total, the most items were added to carts at 12 noon. So the majority of customer activity occurred consistently between 9am and 9pm, which could describe 12 noon being in the middle there – with a small cluster between 10am and 1pm, emphasising that again, with that being the highest add to cart average. 

This is perhaps due to a browser ability like we’ve mentioned before with mobile devices – obviously we all know ecommerce is heading heavy into mobile commerce (or m-commerce), which can, again, be expected this year and for many years to come. 

Cart Abandonment Rates [04:39]

CASEY

So, cart abandonment. As we can see here the average cart abandonment rate over the Black Friday period was 79.88% – so basically 80% – which is slightly lower than the average overall ecommerce abandonment rate of 80.68%. So just to put this into perspective, this is with 38% more online traffic, which shows that online buyers had a major intent to buy. And it’s essential to keep this in mind when we can expect similar results this year, especially with people wanting to grab deals quickly in the current economic crisis. 

So we all know about the cost of living crisis at the moment. People are really going to want to be grabbing on to those deals when they can and Black Friday is a brilliant opportunity to do that, so we’re definitely looking out for that kind of traffic again this year. So through this we can see that mobile accounted for 69% of all abandoned carts than an average cart abandonment rate of around 81%.

BRAD

Yeah, so desktop accounted for 31% of all abandoned baskets with an average cart abandonment rate of just over 74%, whereas mobile accounted for 69% of all abandoned carts with an average abandonment rate of 81%. So this really just show the power of mobile and that pattern going into the future.

Online Sales [05:58]

CASEY

So when we look at total online sales, last year consumers were actively purchasing more than the average in the week leading up to Black Friday. So we can see the significant increase here on this graph, which is online sales each day leading up to the event. 

So for example, overall sales increased by 62%, between Monday the 19th and Black Friday. So again, this could only be expected this year with all of those early bird deals like we talked about earlier.

BRAD

Yeah, so the message here to takeaway is that consumers are becoming increasingly inclined to complete their purchase in the lead up to Black Friday. So with each day leading up to the Black Friday event, the intent of the customer to purchase increases more and more so it’s more important now, more than ever, to set Black Friday campaigns for at least a week before to scoop up the customers that are looking for early bird deals, as Casey said. 

So, mobile accounted for 60% of all online sales during Black Friday, which is a 3% increase on the previous year. So in 2022, retailers should really optimise for mobile. Mcommerce is set to grow even more and main verticals that we track – such as Travel, Fashion and Retail – have certainly adopted a mobile-first approach. 

The most online sales on mobile happened at 9pm and on desktop at 10am. So what does this say? It really shows that the buying behaviour between the two devices are absolutely at the opposite ends of the spectrum. So, the marketing campaigns and the way that you would target these users are very, very different. 

We also would say that anybody interested in scooping up Black Friday sales to really focus on mobile optimisation. It’s really a growing trend throughout ecommerce that’s really going to grow in the future – and this is really the key takeaway from this webinar, is that Black Friday is really a mobile-first event.

Online Traffic By Sector [08:00]

CASEY

So when we look at traffic by sector, the Fashion sector had the most traffic with a 58% share. Retail consumers behind that accounted for 37%, with Travel at just 5%. 

So we can assume that the Fashion and Retail sectors have much more initiatives Black Friday like category sales, with the Travel sector perhaps more inclined to push January and ‘’New Year’’ timeframes. 

So this is a standard that we’ve come to expect year upon year, and I think we all know that things like Fashion apps especially – segmentation with different products or things like categories of, say, coats, bags, shoes – you can really utilise those kinds of things day on day up to the event running to Black Friday for the big main event where everything’s on sale. So really creating excitement around the event is something you can do as well, and Fashion tends to do this really, really well. So there’s something you can take from each of these sectors here.

BRAD

Yeah, and just to dig into some of the individual products, sales and industries – we can see major standouts within the likes of Sports and Outdoor, Consumer Fashion and Airlines. 

Obviously this kind of follows what’s going on in the world right now – coming out of a major pandemic, where gyms were closed [for example] has really caused people to build home gyms and take their health and fitness a lot more seriously. So we can see this weaved into the online sales data here. 

Same with Airlines [for example], airports were closed and having trouble a few months ago and now with everything beginning to open people are looking to go on holiday and make up for lost time, so we can really see that in the numbers here. 

Key Findings [09:45]

Just to sign off, we’d like to draw a spotlight on some of the key findings from the webinar. A major point here is that overall traffic increased by 38% from the start of the week, towards Black Friday, and of that 38% increase in traffic, it equalled a total value of 62% increase in online sales. So for the extra 38% in traffic, there’s a 62% increase in sales. So that’s really a major talking point here. 

We also noticed that mobile accounted for 60% of online sales, which is a slight increase on the year before and as mentioned, given the rate of trajectory in Black Friday in the rate of trajectory in technology, we really do see mobile ecommerce becoming even bigger as the years move on. 

One stat that we have got to back this up is that digital wallets accounted for 47% of ecommerce payment methods throughout the 12 month period of 2021. So all of the stars do point to mobile being the future here for Black Friday. 

If you would like to ask Casey and I any questions about some of the stats that we’ve presented today, or if you’d like to download any of our ebooks such as a Black Friday book, please join salescycle.com – or reach out to Casey or I and we’ll be happy to have any conversations. 

And that’s a goodbye from me!

CASEY

And goodbye from me. Thank you for watching!

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Casey Turnbull

Casey is a Fashion Journalism graduate & ecommerce marketing executive at SaleCycle. Casey is committed to producing high quality content backed by in-depth research and data. She has experience developing content in a range of sectors including fashion, ecommerce and sports.