Black Friday shopping spree sharpens retail competition

The first mass Black Friday, the day after the US holiday of Thanksgiving, when a series of retail promotions kick off the Christmas shopping season, took Romanian IT&C retailers slightly by surprise, with a record number of visitors often jamming websites and generating unexpected sales estimated around the EUR 20 million figure overall.

Otilia Haraga

“The Black Friday concept has already been tested successfully on larger markets, especially in the United States, where the launch of the Christmas sales season takes place on Thanksgiving weekend, a long weekend that starts in the USA on Thursday and gives Americans more time for shopping,” Marius Ghenea, president of the FIT Distribution group, tells BR.

Local retailers believe the day has left its mark. “The Black Friday phenomenon is one that will certainly stick in the history of retail in Romania,” Violeta Luca, marketing director at Flanco, tells BR.

In Romania, Black Friday was pioneered by eMAG and Flanco, but other retailers quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Since this year was only a starting point, not all retailers participated in the initiative. But, irrespective of this, Black Friday had knock-on benefits for all.
“As in other parts of the world, Black Friday has been the biggest shopping event in Romania, exceeding all expectations. The unexpected effect of this campaign was an increase in sales for all retailers on the market, not only those involved in Black Friday,” Irinel Burloiu, marketing director of eMAG, tells BR.

The shopping fever short-circuited websites, with many users complaining that they did not get their turn. However, Ghenea says, “We should not criticize too harshly issues that might have occurred in Romania. This type of problem is pretty normal for a Black Friday situation; such difficulties also hit big websites such as Amazon, Walmart and others in the USA, even during the 2011 edition.”

Of course, with so many sales one wonders: is there any money left in the consumer’s pockets for the Christmas shopping spree as well?
“It is possible that Christmas sales will be affected by Black Friday in a country with an emerging economy like Romania,” say Koyos.ro officials.

Other retailers agree. “There is definitely an impact of starting the Christmas season earlier, but, at the same time, I believe that Black Friday also has many merits for consumers. For instance, it allows them to make acquisitions at very good prices before Christmas, so it is a type of ‘earlier Christmas’,” says Ghenea.
“Black Friday marks the opening of the holiday shopping season, being the day with the highest number of promotions in the year and, in this respect, it is a mere starting point for end of year promotions,” adds Burloiu.

The stores of traditional retailers were taken by storm. More than 200,000 customers came to Flanco over the weekend, of whom 60,000 made a purchase. The company reported sales of over EUR 6.8 million over the Black Friday weekend, shifting over 60,000 products. “The level of the Black Friday weekend sales is equivalent to the total sales in a normal month such as February or June,” says Luca.

Competitor Altex received over 1 million visitors in its shops during the weekend and the volume of sales registered by the retailer hiked 100 percent compared to the previous weekend.
“It is a good start for the holiday season and we estimate we will surpass the EUR 200 million net sales we have set ourselves as a target for this year,” says Dan Ostahie, president of Altex.

The largest online store in Romania, eMAG, had a record number of 100,000 unique visitors at the same time and a total of 1.1 million Romanians accessed the store website that day, “which is 10 times more than usual,” says Burloiu.

eMAG posted sales of EUR 8 million on Black Friday. In total, 90,000 products were ordered in just one day. “The entire Black Friday Stock (30,000 products) was cleared in several hours of the morning – by 13.00,” says Burloiu.

Another online retailer, Koyos.ro, is also boasting high sales. “Koyos.ro was among the first online stores to organize Black Friday promotions, in 2010. The growth in sales in 2011 is because more online retailers have joined in Black Friday and the media coverage has also increased,” say company officials.

This year’s Black Friday Koyos posted sales that were three times higher than last year. Over that weekend, the site had in excess of 100,000 visitors, six times more than on a regular weekend. Some 95 percent of the products had gone to buyers by the end of promotion. “Like all the other retailers, we also saw some peak traffic moments, especially in the first part of the day. We managed to meet the vast majority of the orders, but some customers ordered too late and the products they wanted were no longer in stock,” say company officials.

A big player on the online market, FIT Distribution has also reported a good profit for its online store PCGarage. “There were record sales, the highest level so far, and the traffic on the site that day was 300 percent higher than in an average day,” Ghenea tells BR. “Normally, this kind of sales happen in about a week.”

On Friday, there were more than 83,000 visitors to the PCGarage website, which experienced some problems due to the high traffic.
FIT Distribution also embraced Black Friday fever with discounts offered as part of Cyber Monday, another concept imported from overseas.

However, of the two discount events, retailers expect that Black Friday will have the greater impact in Romania. “If we look at the country that generated these concepts, Cyber Monday brought sales of just USD 1 billion in the United States, while Black Friday generated sales of USD 52 billion. In Romania, estimations for Black Friday’s takings this year are around EUR 10 million.

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