Amazon Black Friday
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Allan
2 years ago -
1560
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For the average UK citizen, the term “Black Friday” carries a lot of negative connotations – like the worst stock market crash since the Great Depression! Not so in the USA! Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving and traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping spree when stores hope to turn a profit and be “in the black.” Online retailers have cottoned on to this and increased Black Friday online sales have been a huge hit across the pond for the last few years.
Now Amazon is aiming for the jackpot by transferring this American tradition over to Amazon.co.uk. Alongside the traditional concept of a sale and five day long discount on thousands of products, Amazon have introduced “Lightning Deals” – periodically released, time-limited deals on an individual item with only a set quantity available. Just think of the struggles and torment of trying to buy tickets to any in-demand concert and you’ll get the idea!
From a digital marketing perspective this promotional tactic is quite effective. Obviously you get a spike in traffic to the website, but those visitors also have to stick around long enough to find out the price of the product. While they are there, they tend to search through the products that are on offer, talk about the next deal on social networks and soak in the information on the Amazon site whilst waiting for the time to tick away.
On the downside, a quick look at the FAQ’s will show how many people have been frustrated by the speed with which products become unavailable. The most popular post at the moment has turned in to a trending game of ‘how many products can you get in your basket by the end of the day’. A war of words has also broken out between disgruntled shoppers who haven’t been able to buy the product they want because “browsers” are just adding products to their basket with no intention of buying at all.
Overall this promotion is a great way of building hype for Amazon, although given the frustrations voiced in the FAQs, it could perhaps generate more negative publicity than positive. Confirmed orders after the sale period would be the only way to find out. The other metric that could be interesting would be to see if there was a sudden influx of products from the lightning deals popping up on eBay. Nice of Amazon to contribute selflessly to eBay in this manner!
6 comments so far to - Amazon Black Friday -
Nice post Allan! Amazon are not the only ones taking part in this Black Friday, there are literally thousands of sites out there big and small that are taking advantage of this day to try and get consumers to spend their hard earned cash ahead of Christmas.
A couple of examples are Microsoft, Sony and of course even some of our very own clients!
Good point Ryan and goes to show yet again that, in terms of online business models and initiatives, where Amazon leads others tend to follow. Amazon is still probably the best example of how to get e-commerce right.
A great article, highlighting not only the positives of the black friday promotion, but the negatives aswell. This was their first year in the Uk so we will have to wait until next year to see if they fix any of the bugs that have caused so much frustration to me, and i’m sure many other customers.
Great article largely because it was based on your own work Andy!
I’m still kicking myself at missing the £50 Wii deal.
It came with the clue ‘Time for this little piggy to go home’. Think about it a second and have a good old groan.
I still wouldn’t mind getting my hands on a discount PS3 (though would prefer one of the old, backwards compatible ones), but it looks like the Xbox is next up…