Despite coming off the back of a prolonged period of economic headwinds and difficult conditions, South African consumers bounced back during this year’s Black Friday week, clocking up massive year-on-year increases in spend on every day of the week.
The Black Friday sales peaked at a 112% increase on the Tuesday, with the lowest increase being a 32% year-on-year growth on Cyber Monday, according to data from the Ecentric Black Friday Dashboard, a real-time tracking tool belonging to Ecentric Payment Systems.
The good news comes at the same time as Stats SA’s surprising announcement that the South African economy shrank by 0,3% in the third quarter.
Even despite concern in some sectors, household consumption, which is often seen as a pillar of the economy, only grew by 0.5%.
Seen against this reality, measuring actual real-time Black Friday retail activity paints a more optimistic picture heading into the festive period.
Ecentric processes 20% of South Africa’s card transactions and serves as a trusted payments partner to 65% of the JSE listed retailers.
According to Rory Bosman, Ecentric’s executive for Sales and Marketing, this gives them real-time visibility and data on transaction trends.
“We track transaction volumes both in-store and online, transaction values, including the average basket size, and trends and changes in metrics in real time.”
Commenting on the large uptick in sales volumes, Bosman says:
“In spite of relatively flat economic conditions this year, consumers are evidently planning their bigger purchases around the special discounts they can find during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, which as we all know, has now expanded to a week-long event rather than just a single day. The average basket value, across all retailers, started at just under R450 and increased to just under R500 by the end of the week.”
By managing all the payments for the retailers it serves both in-store and online, Ecentric found that Black Friday itself had the highest volume of transactions, averaging 2185 transactions a minute, with the highest per-second volume of transactions hitting 133. While Sunday had the lowest volume of transactions, it still averaged 1063 every minute.
Bosman says an interesting development this year is the move towards online purchases, marking a shift in South African buyers’ sentiment towards ecommerce compared to in-store shopping.
“Firstly, the main take home message, which is good for retailers, is that there has been a significant increase in transaction volumes year-over-year. Because the average basket value increased over the course of the week, we can deduce that consumers are shopping around to find the best deals before making their purchases,” says Bosman.
“Secondly, there’s been a marked increase in online purchases versus in-store, especially for big ticket items. The data suggests that people go into physical stores to look for what they want, and to make sure it is the right product, and then they are quite happy to make the actual purchase online based on where they get the best price.”
