Blog
What are the stats & trends for black Friday?
NRF reported that the Thanksgiving weekend attracted 190 million shoppers, an increase of 14% over last year. The biggest spenders were 25-34 year olds, who have high expectations of digital convenience connected to the instore experience.
Online shopping only just topped out in store, 142 million and 124 million respectively, with just over 70 million doing both, so that connected journey is incredibly important.
In terms of what convinced people to spend, the ability to facilitate click and collect was up by 15% compared to last year and mobile devices were used by 75% of buyers doing research, up from 66% last year.
Department stores were the biggest destination for shoppers, representing 50%, with clothing just behind at 36%.
Aside from the actual numbers, what’s useful to take away from this is that online and offline are merging more than ever, and flexibility of device – and seeing that through to purchase – is a big influencer in purchase decisions.
Customisation vs Extensibility: The Day Your Vendor’s Roadmap Becomes Your Problem
Most retailers who changed platforms in the last decade weren't chasing a shinier user interface. They wanted control over specific things: how quickly a new promotion could go live, whether a checkout journey could change without a vendor ticket, whether an in-store process built for one region could be adapted for another without a twelve-month project plan. Control, in other words, meant being able to shape the platform around the business, on the business's own timeline. Most got some version of that control. Fewer of them checked what kind.
The Self-Checkout League of Extraordinary Enactor Retailers
On 30 July, the first Enactor Self-Checkout User Group convened, a session that put technology and operations leads from the Enactor Community around the same table.
