Do shoppers still turn out on the BFCM weekend? This question has been hanging over the heads of retail brands all year, but now we have an answer. Yes, shoppers are still arriving in droves to shop in-person over this crucial shopping period.
We leveraged a massive number of our data points across dozens of stores in a variety of regions and categories to analyze Black Friday and Cyber Monday performance. By comparing the performance of our stores Platform-wide over the holiday against their average performance on each day of the week over the past month, we’re able to see exactly how shopper behavior changes. The results show the extent to which shoppers invest in and shop in person over the BFCM holiday period, and how you can take those learnings forward into the new year. Let’s dive into those results.
Black Friday through Cyber Monday remains the busiest shopping period of the year, and this holds true for the Leap Platform as well. Sales at our stores were 2.2X higher than average, with 76% more orders and 89% more visitors than the average over the previous month. Despite predictions to the contrary, shoppers still came out in force over the weekend to shop in-person in the retail corridors and shopping centers where Leap’s stores are concentrated.
Black Friday remained the busiest day of the holiday period, with more than 4.5X the sales and 4X the visitors of an average Friday across our Platform. While sales and traffic remained above average across the weekend, Black Friday was by far the busiest. Sales continue to spread out further across the month of November, but Black Friday is still the high water mark, and any brands with a physical retail presence should plan accordingly.
While the number of orders across the Platform peaked on Black Friday and decreased slightly day-by-day, we saw that the average order value only increased over the course of the weekend. While the AOV on Friday was only 9.3% larger than average, Cyber Monday saw an AOV that was 56.3% larger. So while more shoppers buy sooner, the biggest purchases come from shoppers who hold out for the end of the holiday—possibly because they’re holding out for the best possible sales.
While not as well-known as Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, or Giving Tuesday, “Sofa Sunday” is known as the day of the holiday weekend when shoppers stay home and browse from their phones to scope out potential purchases for Cyber Monday. When it comes to in-store shopping, it’s also the day when customers add the most individual units to their shopping carts—21% more than the average. This is also 13% larger than the average cart-size during the holiday period. Perhaps Sunday is when shoppers do the most shopping for others on their list in anticipation of the rest of the holiday season?
While it’s known for being a red letter day for ecommerce shopping, Cyber Monday still boasts higher than average in-store results. We saw that sales were 2.4X higher than the average Monday, with 51% more orders and 44% more traffic. It doesn’t quite match up to the performance of Black Friday or the rest of the weekend, but Cyber Monday is very much still an important day for in-store shopping.
While this past BFCM weekend likely wasn’t representative of the full force of a typical holiday weekend, it’s still clear that customers are coming back to stores to buy in-person. Even as more shopping continues to shift to ecommerce, the Black Friday / Cyber Monday proposition still resonates for customers who want to take advantage of deals while experiencing products firsthand. As long as there are still stores to go to, it doesn’t look like the Thanksgiving shopping holiday is going anywhere.
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