Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving when merchants across the United States and increasingly around the world lower their prices in a pre-Christmas buying binge.
Products in the sale
Over the previous decade, there has been a fundamental change in consumer behaviour, and online merchants have outpaced early expectations for what categories of items people were prepared to buy over the internet. Today’s Black Friday shoppers are considerably more comfortable purchasing things over the internet and returning them if the online intangibles aren’t sufficient.
Online shopping was previously limited to items for which customers could have confidence in what the product looked like: books, for example – and physical retail was where people wanted to buy clothes and other products we can’t tell from a screen if they’re appropriate for us.
Extending the sales to a month
Another intriguing element of the rise of internet purchasing is that it is shifting the date on which Black Friday occurs. We’re all accustomed to seeing footage from crowded shopping malls during bargain hunting, but Black Friday is becoming less of a specific day and more of a season. In the future, merchants may utilise the term “Black Friday” as a marketing tool to draw attention to discounts across the month of November in order to begin significant Christmas sales.
Competition
The other way Black Friday has evolved is as follows: As cynically hyped marketing holidays go, Black Friday is now an ancient custom that may be traced back to the early 20th century. Consumers, on the other hand, are not sentimental about it; and we’ve seen the development of competing shopping days during the last decade.
This is not to mention the growing significance and size of retail holidays throughout the world owing to the rise of Asian competition for Black Friday. With new retail holidays becoming more and more popular, Bob Phibbs, Retail Doctor said to Betway “It gives you a chance to go out to a different consumer and it gives you a chance to give people the feeling that they matter.” These niche holidays are becoming increasingly utilised by businesses across the world.
The first and most obvious is Amazon’s Prime Day, which takes place in mid-July in the West. This is essentially the same as Black Friday, but it is focused on a single company. Other shops are jumping on the bandwagon by having Prime Day sales of their own, even if they have nothing to do with Amazon.