Online retailers relying heavily on Black Friday to meet sales

IMRG’s Online Retail Index has revealed that this year, retailers are advertising Black Friday deals earlier than ever and are increasingly reliant on the promotional period.

The business monitors daily revenue performance, campaign start dates, and other specific performance metrics. Three weeks before Black Friday week, 48 of the 295 stores that were assessed this year went live. Just one week later, this number had risen steadily to over 114, indicating strong competitiveness and involvement.

These early efforts haven’t always been successful, either. An industry reduction has been observed year over year, according to IMRG’s Online Retail Index, which monitors the online sales performance of over 200 companies around the UK. About half of the eighty retailers surveyed on November 16th stated that their performance for the week was “below expectation.”

Retailers are under a lot of pressure to hit their goals this Black Friday week after the market performed flat (+0.5 per cent) in the first week of November and down 6.2 per cent in the second week compared to the same period last year.

These observations align with what IMRG had anticipated for Black Friday Week. IMRG projects a 3 per cent decline in clothes sales and an average 2 per cent decline in the overall market. This was predicated on studies of recent internet income success as well as outside variables like the cost-of-living crisis. Retailers are optimistic that consumers have been anticipating Black Friday week’s “big deals.”

Andy Mulcahy, Strategy and Insight Director at IMRG, commented, “The signs so far in November have not been very positive, and it means there is a lot of ground to be made up if it is to be a successful trading month for retailers.”