by Tom Shackleton

With Amazon claiming this year’s Cyber Monday as the biggest shopping day in their history, it’s clear that the growth of Black Friday weekend isn’t slowing any time soon. But away from Amazon’s eCommerce juggernaut, how are fast growing eCommerce retailers performing, and what can you learn from them?

With Amazon claiming this year’s Cyber Monday as the biggest shopping day in their history, it’s clear that the growth of Black Friday weekend isn’t slowing any time soon. But away from Amazon’s eCommerce juggernaut, how are fast growing eCommerce retailers performing, and what can you learn from them?

This year, we analysed real Black Friday weekend data from 20 successful, high-growth client stores to see just how the shopping event is impacting everything from conversions to returning customer rates in verticals from fashion to food.

Here’s what we learned from analysing the Black Friday 2018 data of 20 high-growth client eCommerce stores, and what you can learn and apply to your own eCommerce business.

Incredible Conversion Rates

As you might expect with some incredible offers available from our client stores, we saw a general trend towards significant conversion rate improvements.

Black Friday Conversion Rate

The top performing store in our data finished up with a conversion rate of 14.92% over Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend.

Amongst the stores which performed the best, a focus on optimising the customer journey, conversion rate optimisation and ongoing improvement over the past year has led to year-on-year improvements in Black Friday metrics.

Working on optimising your store throughout the year definitely pays off when the peak trading season arrives.

Returning Customers Lead to Success

A common factor among stores that performed well seems to be a high returning customer rate, with our top performer generating almost three quarters of orders from existing customers.

While Black Friday is undoubtedly an opportunity to draw in new shoppers, this underlines the importance of having a strategy for targeting and marketing to existing customers if you want to succeed on Black Friday.

Make sure that your email marketing, automations and remarketing strategies are in good shape when BFCM comes around next year.

Huge Sector Differences

Another key takeaway from our analysis were huge discrepancies between sectors when it comes to conversion rate.

Beauty and lifestyle stores performed the best, with an average conversion rate of 8.80%, while food and drink followed close behind with an average of 8.67%.

Perhaps surprisingly fashion stores had the lowest average conversion rate at 1.48%, with luxury brands bringing down the average from the higher performing fast-fashion stores.

This just goes to show how careful you need to be when benchmarking your store performance. Even within sectors, widely different product propositions can make industry benchmarks deceptive.

If you want to improve your own benchmarking, an eCommerce agency can help you benchmark your store performance more effectively by comparing against similar stores to identify opportunities and performance improvements.

#BFCM18 in Numbers

Black Friday weekend continues to grow year after year, with a store’s success hinging more than ever on a successful peak period.

The biggest takeaway from our analysis is just how key preparation and planning is to a successful weekend.

Your preparation for next year’s peak should begin as soon as possible with ongoing site optimisation and development. Our high-growth stores started early with ongoing store optimisation and development to ensure their sites perform at their best.

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