5 things to know about Black Friday 2019

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become highlights in the activity of many merchants and cyber merchants. These two days with very different origins have one thing in common: they are the promise that many brands make to their customers to do very (very) good business.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday; what is it? When is it?

Like other “holidays” with a strong commercial connotation imported from the United States, such as Halloween or Valentine’s Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are now fully integrated into the commercial agenda of many professionals.

What makes the strength of these days (apart from their relative novelty) is their very strong specificities:

• Theoretically, the discounts granted can reach levels that are rarely found during the rest of the year (40, 50 or even 70%).
• Their place in the calendar is the starting point for year-end purchases.
• Black Friday (29 November 2019) allows merchants and e-merchants to achieve one of the highest sales of the year in a single day.
• Cyber Monday (December 2, 2019) is exclusively for cyber merchants.
• Unlike the sales which are mainly intended for traditional showcase shops, these two days allow other retailers such as car brands, travel agencies, banks, beauty salons… to offer important discounts to their customers.

To optimize the turnover of these days and to ensure a better return on investment of the advertising expenses devoted to them, it is more and more frequent to see the appearance of Black Friday Week or Black cyber Week which, as you have understood, allow to extend the duration of this promotion period.

Black Friday in Luxembourg

After a timid start in 2014 and 2015, Black Friday now seems to have become part of the habits of consumers and traders in Luxembourg.

In 2017 the news site adada.lu had estimated the advertising revenue of the Black Friday 2017 edition of the newspaper the most important. This calculation was made on the basis of the list price of the advertisements charged by this newspaper and therefore did not take into account any discounts that advertisers may be granted. The advertising turnover thus extrapolated reached 148,000 euros!

The omnipresence of Black Friday advertisements in all media in the weeks leading up to it is indicative of how important this event is to merchants and how competitive they are with each other to attract customers. Unfortunately neither the Statec nor the CLC produce precise statistics on the impact of these two days for the moment, so we cannot confirm the general impression that Black Friday is a success in Luxembourg by precise figures.

Amazon Prime Day stronger than Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Why share the spotlight with others when you are the undisputed world leader in online sales?  This is surely the thought that Amazon’s marketing managers had to give themselves a few years ago when they created Amazon Prime Day.

Amazon Prime Day is a global business operation organized by the e-commerce giant for members of its Amazon Prime loyalty program.

And in 2019 as in 2018, Prime Day was the largest business event in Amazon’s history around the world. Worldwide sales during the two days of Prime Day, July 15 and 16, exceeded the combined sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday with more than 175 million products sold worldwide.

But Alilbaba is even stronger!

On the occasion of the “Singles Day”, 11/11 (the 1 embodying in this symbolism the singles), the alibaba website applies aggressive discounts and promotions on all products for sale on its website. In 2018, all the site’s sales records exploded with a turnover of 27 billion euros and more than a billion parcels in 24 hours.

By the way, in 2018 the billion dollar turnover mark was reached after only one minute and 25 seconds!

However, these commercial operations are not unanimously accepted

The consumerist and advertising frenzy that surrounds these two days is beginning to have increasingly determined critics. Because if these days seem to be the promise of saving money, what about the overconsumption and compulsive purchases that they can cause in some people?

• Green Days, White Days or Fair Fridays are initiatives, for the moment of a small scale, that have emerged to encourage and raise awareness of responsible consumption and the environmental consequences of mass over-consumption.
• The French, German or Belgian customs services regularly warn against certain overly attractive offers from online sales sites that do not always announce customs taxes in their prices.
• Some retailers even boycotted these two days. The most extreme case was reported in 2018 with the camif.fr website, which deliberately cut off access throughout the Black Friday day.