What Are Black Friday 2020 Trends?

Black Friday 2020 is close and BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday) is considered as an important event for businesses. It is the starting point of the shopping season in many countries such as the US and both shop owners and people plan for this shopping day. This year’s Covid-19 pandemic  may even change the situation more than before. Online shopping has increased significantly compared to the last year and although this can be an excellent opportunity for online shops, knowing more about shopping day and BFCM, helps to get ready better. We’ve collected some valuable data about last year’s Black Friday which can give you a hint for this year. Learn more about Shopgram AI and analyzing data process here: https://towardsdatascience.com/shopify-products-eda-8c14e3e544e8

In Which Countries Shopify Black Friday Is Hot?

First of all, Let’s see which countries take Black Friday Cyber Monday seriously. Black Friday is the beginning of the shopping season which ends with Christmas holiday.  So we can say countries which celebrate Christmas care more about shopping day. And other countries have this shopping event other times of the year.

Talking about Black Friday 2020 , it is clear that the store’s sales rise in most of the countries.

As it is clear in the 2019 chart, The peak in the number of new products published is in the 47th week of the year, which we called it  Black Friday week.

But do we know in which countries, the Shopify Black Friday is hot? Let’s see!

In order to make a comparison between Shopify stores, we made two pie charts of the main currencies stores use for their transactions. The first chart is for the currency distribution used in all months of 2019 and 2020, and the second one is the currencies used at 2019 Black Friday week.

We can see a considerable rise in the percentage of USD and EUR transactions in black Friday and a noticeable decrease in the percentage of “other” currencies transactions.

Rise in the EUR transaction percentage means that shopping at Black Friday increases more in European countries than in Australia, Great Britain and Canada.

But we cannot tell the same about the US because USD is used widely by international stores and is not a good indicator for US stores.

Fortunately, we have data about many store’s countries of origin. So let’s look at country distribution in the whole year and in black Friday week:

As we can see in the pie charts, the United states percentage has not increased in BFCM. However we can see a meaningful increase in Canada (1.1%) and a slight increase in UK percentage (0.4%). Means that Black Friday is more important in Canadian stores than the rest. So more enthusiasts toward Black Friday 2020 in Canada is predictable. 

Black Friday Effect On Products Publish Rate

Any holiday affects shop owners’ behaviour and their rate of publishing new products. Black Friday isn’t an exception and the publishing rate differs at this time of the year. Let’s take a look at the rate of publishing products in more than 700K Shopify stores, to see the effects of Black Friday on the growth in sales in Shopify stores. This data has been taken from a sample of about 750.000 Shopify stores , so the real product publish rates are more than the numbers in the report, but the charts behavior is an accurate simulation of the Shopify stores trend.

We can see a global trend in publishing products in different weeks of the year 2019.

The peak of publishing products is at week 47 which is the Black Friday week.

Now lets see the same chart for different regions and countries:

In the North America chart the growth trend is slighter than the global chart. As it is shown above, the product publishing rate does not change a lot in US Shopify stores. Instead, there is a tangible change in Canada shopping volume at the Black Friday week.

As we compare Europe with North America, we see that the increase in the rate of publishing products is way more in European stores of Shopify! Means that Black Friday makes a considerable change in the European shopping volume, in comparison with North-Americans. So Black Friday changes in shopping  are  more interesting and considerable in Europe. 

Which product types are trending at Black Friday?

Black Friday Cyber Monday leads to massive traffic to online shops which means shop owners must pay attention to two things: Their website performance to handle this traffic and their inventory. Knowing the trends helps shop owners purchase what’s needed most and get ready for Black Friday 2020.

Let’s take a look at the data from more than 700K stores in 2019 and 2020.For starters, we observe Canada, the origin of Shopify and a country with about 5% of total Shopify stores.

Canada

In the table below numbers show which product types are more popular generally in Canadian Shopify stores and which product types were popular especially at the Black Friday week in 2019:

Canada:

*As it is shown on the table, some types of products decrease in shares at Black Friday. This cannot be interpreted as a decrease in the volume of sales at Black Friday week, it only shows that these products had less increase in amount of sales than other ones.

T-shirts, tops, accessories, dress, earrings and necklaces are popular generally. At the Black Friday week in 2019, we see a rise in the share of earrings, necklaces, bracelets, sweatshirts and hoodies,  but the amazing jump is in the share of jewelries. We have the specified Jewelries types (“earring”, “necklace” and “bracelet”) and the “Jewelry” type which generally refers to all kinds of Jewelries. All types of jewelries together, raised from 10.4% share to 14.9%  in Black Friday. This data shows the Canadian tendency to buy more Jewelries near Black Friday and this can happen again for Black Friday 2020.

The biggest loss of share in Black Friday Cyber Monday is for tops and dresses, and in general for clothing. But note that they are still the most popular products to sell in shopify stores. In other words, buying clothes from Shopify stores is popular all year round, but  jewelries became more popular at the 2019 Black Friday.

Let’s take a look at the UK numbers, another country with a hot shopping day.

Great Britain:

Different clothing types like t-shirt, dress, top, and accessories are common in GB stores the same as Canadian stores. But here in Britain (unlike Canada), the share of clothing products like t-shirt, dress and clothing accessories raised in the Black Friday week and clothing share of sales in 2019 BFCM was higher than the rest of the year in the UK.

Unlike Canada, Britain Shopy stores’ share of selling jewelries like bracelets and earrings  decreased. This doesn’t mean that the total sales in jewelries decrease on Black Friday, But almost all of the product’s sales rise in that week. We are talking about the growth of the share of each product type. In Britain, clothing product types which mentioned above experienced more rise in sales than jewelries.

The exceptions in clothing products are tops and pants, with 6% and 5% decrease in their share of sales. So we can expect this to happen again in Black Friday 2020.

United States

Let’s investigate the data from US Shopify stores, US stores consist of more than 40% of Shopify stores.

The most popular product types in US shopify stores are “t-shirt”, “top”, “accessories”, “earings”, “necklace” and “dress”. As we can see in the Canada, GB and US table, these 6 product types are the most popular types in each of these countries.

In the US, we see a considerable rise in the share of t-shirt, earrings, necklaces, sweatshirt, hat and hoodie. However, we cannot distinguish a clear pattern in the rise of the share of clothings and jewelry.

USA:

The product types which have the same behavior in these 3 countries are:

• Necklace, Hoodie, Sweatshirt share of sales increased in the Black Friday week of 2019. Increase in the sale of hoodies and sweatshirts is probably because of the winter and the need for warm clothing in the north of the globe. 
• “Tops” share of sales has decreased in these countries.

Final Thought

Knowing the trends in each country helps shop owners to manage their inventory better for Black Friday 2020 and On the other hand shops can find related trend products and add them to their current products. Black Friday Cyber Monday is a good opportunity for increasing revenue and by preparing you can make the most out of it.