Has Everyone Gone Crazy with Global Shopping Frenzies?

A recent survey conducted by an eCommerce services agency shows that Black Friday may no longer be a shopping frenzy for Americans alone.

Americans may find that a bit odd. Black Friday is inseparable from Thanksgiving, the quintessential holiday of our culture*, celebrated every year on the fourth Thursday of November. Families get together, make plans for Christmas, and with shopping in mind, they hit the malls on Black Friday, Thanksgiving’s commercially conjoined twin.

Now, it seems, people from Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Australia and Japan are joining in, at least as far as their shopping habits go.

The survey shows that an average of 17% of the respondents from those countries prefer to buy online on Black Friday, compared to 26% of US shoppers. Oddly, 27% of survey respondents from the UK preferred online shopping on Black Friday, edging out Americans by a percent (perhaps because in the US, a trip to the mall on Black Friday is part of the culture).

Shopping Frenzies Mean Business

The reason for this trend is simple. eCommerce sellers and marketplaces have lifted a shopping event from its real-world roots and turned into a cyber sales event that obviously has no borders. The sale and the event are the thing, not the cultural artifact behind it.

China has its own kind of Black Friday in November, Singles Day (11/11), said to have originated among male students at Nanjing University in 1993. The gigantic online marketplace Alibaba has in recent years turned Singles Day into an online shopping frenzy that makes Black Friday look a little anemic by comparison.

Alibaba made US$17.7 billion in sales on Singles Day this month, surpassing last year’s $14.3 billion in goods. Even if those figures were inflated, as some observers have contended, total receipts for Black Friday in 2015 were $4.5 billion. Singles Day, then, may very well be the planet’s biggest online shopping event.

If shopping frenzies grow and spread through our virtually borderless world, the potential for companies to compete and grow online expands with it.

Any company with a strategy to develop multiple sales channels should be preparing for these events by selling through online marketplaces and developing an eCommerce inventory strategy.

*The author is from the US.