Black Friday – online retailers hope for long-term gain

FOR some retailers Black Friday can be a challenge, but for those who have prepared well and have both sufficient digital bandwidth and the infrastructure to meet demand, it can be a blessing.

Last year Speke-based Shop Direct, owner of the Very and Littlewoods brands, wooed more than 20,000 new customers between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a large proportion of which have become repeat shoppers.

Chief executive Alex Baldock said: “Many retailers don’t like Black Friday. I understand that; it certainly complicates our lives. But our customers love it – why wouldn’t they?

“This is no vanity exercise for us. We’re in it to make money. And we can, thanks to our strong supplier relationships, months of careful planning, and (most importantly) thanks to all the new customers Black Friday brings to Very.

“Last year, we got 21,000 new customers, about half of whom became repeat customers. That means healthy long-term profits to us. And that means we like Black Friday.”
 
Richard Clark,  marketing director at Manchester based fast fashion retailer Boohoo, said it would be using Black Friday to promote discounted products and also to penetrate social media further.

He said: “There is no denying the impact Black Friday had on the retail world last year with the biggest surge in online traffic recorded over black Friday into cyber Monday.

“With huge demand for clothing/ apparel over this weekend, boohoo will be offering competitive discounts across all our categories.

“At boohoo we stay competitive with pricing all year round so Black Friday is just an opportunity for us to offer more great deals to our consumers .We will use this opportunity to further engage with our customers with the launch of our ‘Win the value of your basket back’ an online campaign which launches on Cyber Monday. The aim of this is to give the opportunities for boohoo customers to effectively get their order for free from us, just by retweeting their order numbers.”

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