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Black Friday Highlights 2020: What we’ve seen across 1.000+ Sooqr accounts

10 August 2021

We did it. The e-commerce industry has another Black Friday in the books. And, as we here at Sooqr and many others predicted, this was a record-breaking kick-off of the holiday season for online retailers.

What caught our attention in 2020

Sales started earlier

As we predicted, sales and discounts started a lot earlier this year. We knew from previous years that promotions would be out in the week leading up to Black Friday. But this year set a new record: A lot of retailers started their sales an additional three days earlier compared to last year. Here at Sooqr, we see this in the search data for the weekend before Black Friday: compared to 2019, searches on that weekend were already up by 6%.

Generally, we see traffic being more spread out during the time between Singles’ Day and Cyber Monday instead of the historical, massive spike on Black Friday itself. And this has a good reason: retailers across the globe are making an effort to release some of the pressure on fulfillment and shipping providers.

This year set a new record: A lot of retailers started their sales an additional three days earlier compared to last year.

Industries with most growth

As historically expected, we saw the most search spikes for the consumer electronics and fashion industry. Though: for some of our customers in the consumer electronics arena, the day of the PlayStation 5 release actually outperformed Black Friday! Talk about having a powerful brand. That’s definitely a data point that caught our attention!

For some Sooqr customers, the day of the PlayStation 5 release outperformed Black Friday.

Some of our fashion customers had even bigger increases in their search volumes than our consumer electronics customers. On average, we saw about 10%-15% increased search volumes for the time between Singles’ Day and Cyber Monday among fashion clients compared to 2019. You’ll see the earlier start of the promotions this year very clearly by looking at the blue line:

In the fashion industry as well, promotions started a lot earlier than last year.

The two industries that saw more growth in 2020 than they traditionally do were home & garden and health & beauty. One of our beauty customers e.g. saw a 30% increase in search volume compared to last year between Singles’ Day and Cyber Monday. This also not due to a massive spike on the actual day of Black Friday but due to higher search numbers leading up to it.

Search traffic for Sooqr health & beauty customers was up by 30% compared to 2019.

Two thirds of all sales from mobile

In Shopify’s live coverage of Black Friday data, we see that almost 70% of all 2020 Black Friday sales came through a smartphone. That’s big. Less than a third of sales are actually originating from desktop. To anyone who still isn’t operating with a “mobile first” attitude… We wish good luck!

One of the mistakes we see out there a lot is to not give your mobile onsite search the attention it deserves in 2020. On many sites, the site search is responsive, but it loses some (or all) of its functionalities when not on a desktop device. Once on mobile, you’re suddenly not able to filter down your search results or sort them by popularity or price. If you see this within your own search engine, be aware that this hurts your conversion rates.

Online shoppers during the holiday season have a high buying intent and come to your site in most cases knowing exactly what they want. So, you need to make sure they find what they’re looking for on your site fast. Did you know that 3 in 4 shoppers bounce due to a poor search experience? And that 43% of your visitors will go to your search bar immediately?

You’ll boost your competitive advantage during the busiest season of the year significantly by optimizing your onsite search. To cater to the increasing number of smartphone shoppers you simply can’t afford to neglect having an awesome search on mobile as well.

But the good news is: It’s an easy fix. Getting your search engine optimized for mobile can be done in as little as 15 minutes. Ready to give it a try? Our Conversion Specialists are happy to take a look at your search together with you. You can book this free (no strings attached) audit session here.

It’s not too late to optimize your store before Christmas to ensure a better experience for your holiday shoppers. Plus, here at Sooqr we also see search volumes going up in the week after Christmas. Why is that? Everyone that got a gift card for the holidays is now eager to start searching for what to use it on!

Do you see similar trends for your e-commerce store? Or do you see something entirely different? We love hearing from you! Reach out to us at [email protected].

Thanks for reading!

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