It’s that time of year again, getting deep into November when the retail industry goes into overdrive for a giddy period as retailers execute on their well-laid plans to entice shoppers to divert a portion of their spend toward their wares.

In principle, it all sounds simple enough – for many retailers, demand is at a year-high as people start buying presents for Christmas, so they come to retail sites with greater frequency and intent than is usual. They also visit sites they wouldn’t normally be interested in to find gift ideas for a range of ages and demographics depending on whom they need to buy for. It’s a sales conversion that is just waiting to happen.

However: chuck in a massive, all-encompassing discount event as a preface to that and the water gets a little muddied. It is now ten years since Black Friday really exploded into the UK public consciousness – in 2014 many retailers piled into offer Black Friday discounts for the first time, shoppers responded in their droves, sites fell over due to the sheer volumes of traffic, operations teams got flooded with the orders and the carriers couldn’t cope with having such a huge surge in parcels over such a short timeframe.

From that moment on, there was no going back; shoppers now expected retailers to offer big Black Friday discounts and, even though there were dissenting voices from within retail discouraging participation, the fact is there will always be those who will do it regardless so over time most retailers have tended to be drawn in. But to counter the problem of too much volume in too short a time, campaign durations have evolved.

The Evolving Black Friday Landscape

First the discounts were available just for a day, then a 4-day weekend became common, then a week and two weeks and even a full month is now by no means a rarity. This year a few notable names went live with Black Friday campaigns in October. We might assume there would be some natural limits to how long campaigns could run for, but perhaps not – we’ve seen cheeky ones go live in July for a quick blast before.

Running a long campaign does, on average, seem to generate more revenue for participating retailers. So in that sense it does seem a reasonable idea, though that’s not to say they actually make much profit from it. Running a longer campaign also makes it more difficult to keep getting people to come back again and again – once you’ve declared that you’re in it, the impact of the ‘Black Friday sale now on’ message becomes a bit blunted.

As the ‘Black Friday period’ now covers such a vast swathe of time, its performance – at the most important time of year for driving sales for many retailers – can go through peaks and troughs. Until the dust settles on the whole period it can be difficult to  decide whether it has gone well or not; and the way this November has started is falling well and truly into that category.

For the last week of October (w/c 28th), ecommerce sales dipped -5.9%, the sharpest decline since June. That week included 1st November, when Black Friday campaigns start to be switched on in earnest, so in that light it could be considered a pretty poor start to peak proceedings. The first week of November was also down, with revenue falling -3.9%. At face value, this is not auguring well.

But – this is perhaps where the moveable nature of Black Friday comes into play. It is linked to Thanksgiving in the US, the fourth Thursday of November, which puts it on 29th November this year. Last year it was on the 24th, so the weeks featuring the actual big day have changed. That slow start to trading might be explained by the below graph, which shows the results of a retailer survey where we asked them when they would be launching their Black Friday campaigns.

We asked retailers "when will you be launching your Black Friday campaigns?"

Almost half of those campaigns are yet to go live due to that date change and, from our campaign tracking this year, we can see that the number of live campaigns has been below those on the same days last year. Put succinctly: at the time of writing (18th November) Black Friday had not really got into top gear yet, whereas the next two weeks should see that turnaround.

Which isn’t to say that understanding it will be easy. Again, due to the date change, we have a week coming that featured the big day of Black Friday last year, but doesn’t this year. So the like-for-like might not look very good (or it might do ok, as there is a chain of thought around ‘Fake Friday’, the week before Black Friday proper but that falls so late in the month a lot of people might assume this is the big day), but the week after might be very strong.

The reality with an event this big in retail, that moves around and changes shape each year, is that it’s difficult to assess how it really went until the whole thing is in the rearview mirror. It has been, is being, and always will be, a test of nerve.