Black Friday 2016 War Bunker

#EcomChat on Monday 28th November could only really talk about one topic, no matter how much our heavy souls fight it: #BlackFriday.

This year more retailers seem to have adopted the long tail approach, launching the event in the preceding week and turning it into a 7 day gluttonous feast. With years’ of experience in handling the mayhem, expectation was less site outages this year but still we’ve been pleasantly surprised by high profile issues e.g. Quidco site crashed, Currys PC World had downtime issues and in the US, Macy’s had the wobbles.

Not everyone followed the high street – Patagonia announced 100% of sales on the Friday would be donated to supporting local environmental causes, and brands like Rei.com continued their boycott by encouraging people to opt-out and do something else than shop.

So let’s pull apart once more this US imported retail extravaganza.

As ever: there will be 3 conversation starter questions and anyone is welcome to join in (or just listen) using the #EcomChat hashtag on Twitter.

Here are the 3 questions:

1. Are retailers adopting different sales tactics this year?
2. How stable have websites been over the weekend compared to previous years?
3. Does Black Friday weekend have a future in UK retail?

Join us at 1pm UK time on Monday and do share this post either on Twitter or via email with anyone you think would be interested.

Thanks, Dan & James.

p.s. If you’re wondering “what’s this about?” there is a page explaining all just here.