A big Black Friday?
Last year’s Black Friday sales surpassed Boxing Day in Australia for the first time in history. With our forced shift to eCommerce due to COVID in 2020 can this year be even bigger? It’s been mixed results for most of the big brands, but Amazon certainly isn’t dominating like many predicted. If your store is involved this year, here’s what you need to know.
- Can this year be bigger and better?
- With bricks & mortar reopening, how will that affect eCommerce?
- What the end of lockdown means for some brands
- The one thing you should get ready.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. It’s Black Friday week. That’s right. And I haven’t done a show for one month. That’s the longest break I’ve ever had. The last one I did was big tick censorship was scary and you will notice that the Twitter handle is now gone from my backdrop. So if you want to reach out to me I’m still on YouTube, but I might be also uploading to another platform which I’m investigating at the moment. And also I’ll be on LinkedIn because on LinkedIn you’re less of a product, because you know, there’s an option to pay to be on there.
Biggest Black Friday ever?
And it seems to be less “censory” for the moment, anyway. So, and if you didn’t know what I was talking about with the “censory” stuff, go back and watch. Have a look at the last show. I’m a big advocate against censorship in case you’re new here. I want to talk to you a little bit about what happened last year. What we think might happen this year Black Friday last year was the first time it surpassed Boxing Day in Australia for interest and popularity. And so it’s going to be interesting to see what happens this year, given what’s happened with COVID lockdown and everything else, but I just want to show you some of the marketplaces and a couple of our major retailers here in Australia, what’s happened over the last five years with their brands and the interest in specifically what’s happened with COVID this year for some of these retailers and what it might mean for you going forward.
So we can see here’s the last five years, we’ve got red as eBay, and you can see they’ve been on a steady decline right up until we went into isolation back here in March. So this is March this year, and you can see here, we’ve had Amazon, the big announcement, what’s that two years ago? And, but it’s sort of been puffing along. And then when we get to the lockdown, we see it has a bit of an uptick as well. And part of that uptick is for this, from this green line, which is Amazon prime video. So a lot of other people wanting to have something to watch, cause we’re all in lock down and we need more variety for the family. So I think that has sort of stabilised quite a bit. We’ve seen a little bit of up and down here, which is interesting. I’m not too sure why recently, but the big winners look like to be our bricks and mortar retailers, Kmart and Big W and when we go and look at the related queries for those brands, we can see that… What’s spiking at the moment with eBay is Afterpay, Kmart is Afterpay.
And Big W is no Afterpay, Oh yes Big W Afterpay, so that’s quite incredible. That’s the last five years rising trends for those brands. So we go the last 12 months and we get a bit of granularity of what’s been happening with these brands. Where their… And I looked at other marketplaces as well, like Kogan, Catch, but not really comparable to the volume that we’re seeing with say Big W, Kmart. And you can see here, this is isolation, but Kmart Australia. This online trend has continued and we go back and when we have a look at toilet paper for eBay, a ring light for Kmart. But if we go the last say 90 days.
Amazon isn’t dominating yet.
But what it shows here is that online shopping got a big boost during COVID certainly in Australia and Big W and Kmart are just cleaning up. If I put JB Hi-Fi in there, we might see them in there as well. JB Hi-Fi retail company, and you can see there. They’ve got a spike here and that’s in November, which is interesting. So may have had a sale recently. It might’ve been an announcement recently, but certainly all of them are getting much more interest than say Amazon is. And you know, I like competition, but Amazon doesn’t seem to be there in Australia quite just yet. I’m not saying they won’t be, but it’s slower than what we were expecting. Certainly. And Shopify there, just to give you an idea of, merchants looking to set up their sites and those sorts of things, or to swap gives you some perspective on the rest of the country and what the retailers… What retailers they’re looking for.
And another one in here, we’ll now put another big box retailer in here called Harvey Norman. But once again, Harvey Norman, isn’t the same brand all around the country. It has different brands in New South Wales, I think maybe Queensland, but you can see there once again, it’s done really well and it’s getting… It’s almost on par now with Amazon in Australia, which is really interesting because Amazon in Australia, as we just showed a lot of that is for prime video content. So there’s a lot happening and I hope you’re prepared for this week. And just remember that as I warned about a month ago, get your… Some people had sales earlier. Like I said, which was a great idea, but if you’ve got your shipping in order…. I’ve had a lot of complaints about certain suppliers of shipping in Australia.
And a lot of those retailers have moved from say one courier company and they’ve brought on a few others just to make sure that they can keep up with the demand this year, because I think that’s going to be big. But honestly, I don’t know because it’s been a crazy, crazy year. I hope you are well, and please like, share and subscribe wherever you see this video, because it won’t just be on YouTube. Probably won’t be on Facebook, but it will be on LinkedIn and hopefully that’s helpful and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
