What we learned from Black Friday 2024: The surprising trend for sellers on Amazon
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Another busy Black Friday Week is over, and our data supports Amazon’s assertion that it was the biggest one yet.
Amazon says that this year’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday period, beginning on 21 November, saw both record sales and a record number of items sold.
And our clients have certainly seen amazing results.
Here’s what we’ve learned from this year’s Black Friday event, and how you can apply it to future Amazon sales days.
Black Friday 2024: e-Comas’s results
Using conversion rate as the metric, we’ve compared Amazon sales for all our clients over the Black Friday period (21 November-2 December) with the last non-Black-Friday-Week day, 20 November.
Before 21 November, the figures were fairly level every day through the month, with no more than a 20% difference in sales on any day throughout November. The figures for 1 November and 20 November were pretty much the same.
Across e-Comas’s seller accounts, we saw a 2x jump in conversion rates on Thursday 21st November compared to the previous day - a 104% increase, showing that customers were ready to start saving and catching deals the minute Black Friday week began.
Conversion rates peaked at +160% over the normal rate on Black Friday itself. As we suspected, this was the most popular sales day over the period.
Results vary from client to client. For a few clients, the 21st was the biggest day overall, better than Black Friday itself. For others, Black Friday was much more successful: one client, having already almost tripled their sales on the 21st, tripled that figure again on Black Friday. It can depend on the product, the market, and the way the brand advertises.
One of our clients achieved around 5x their previous November average because with the discounts offered, they won back the buy box on many of their key ASINs, meaning their product visibility was much higher.
The big trend
The major trend we’ve noticed this year is that for some of our clients, while sales were strong on Black Friday itself, they were even stronger on Thursday 21 November, when most deals first went live.
That’s interesting because the 21st was a full week and a day before Black Friday. Yet for most of our clients, the massive spike in sales on the 21st was followed by slightly weaker sales over the next few days. (But generally still well up compared to previous days in November - between a 44% and 70% increase across all our clients.)
It shows that consumers are well prepared for the sales days and aware of when they’ll fall, regardless of when the ‘official’ sale day is. Savvy shoppers were ready and waiting for those deals to go live on the 21st. The second spike on Black Friday, the traditional sales day, indicates wider awareness of Black Friday as a brand.
These spikes, and customers’ level of awareness, are worth bearing in mind when planning future sales days, including next year’s Prime Days and Black Friday week 2025.
How to prepare for Black Friday on Amazon
Seems early to be talking about Black Friday 2025, but the best way to prepare for the future is to learn from the present.
It’s not just about making sure you have deals available. Ensuring all your listings content is optimised, and preparing your ad campaigns to make sure your deals and discounts are visible and seen by the biggest possible audience, are vital.
For Black Friday 2025, we recommend you:
- Find out as early as possible Amazon’s deadlines to submit your deals. The deadlines are usually around late September/early October; Amazon usually releases this information around August. Follow us on social media and we’ll keep you in the loop.
- Think about what deals you want to use. We really like Prime Exclusive Discounts, because we find they display and perform similarly to Best Deals and Lightning Deals, but are significantly cheaper.
- Advertise your deals. Yes, advertising on Amazon is more expensive over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period, but without advertising you’ll definitely lose visibility, and won’t see the benefit of offering deals in the first place. How you manage your ads over this period makes a big difference. It’s very important to increase your budgets and bids, as competition and search volume increase as well.
- Make sure your listings are optimised. The best advert in the world won’t generate sales unless your titles and bullet points are informative and compelling, your description gives all the details the shopper needs, and your images show the product to its best advantage. We recommend spending time optimising your A+ content and brand store to reflect the season.
- Check your inventory levels. It can be hard to predict how much stock you’ll need, but you can use this year’s event sales figures as a guide, and ensure you don’t miss Amazon’s FBA inventory deadlines.
- Remember that it doesn’t end here! In the lead-out time to come, you have big opportunities for targeting and capturing repeat customers and winning more sales. More on that below!
“This weekend I bought a hard drive for my computer and I chose it mostly because it had proper bullet points and an A+ that explained all the characteristics. Whenever I see A+ content it makes me think ‘good, they’re taking Amazon seriously’.”
- Cristian
Maximising lead-up and lead-out times
Everyone expects to see lower conversion rates just after Black Friday Week: naturally, shoppers tend to do their buying during the sale period.
However, by studying the ‘tentpole’ figures from Amazon, using Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)’s Amazon Tentpole Phase Analysis report, we can see that the lead-out and lead-up periods do get more traffic than you’d expect.
Brands that boost their visibility during these periods see better conversion rates overall.
This year we used the tentpole effect for several clients, ensuring their ad budget was spread evenly across the seven-day lead-up, event and lead-out phases - which, according to AMC, generates the best results in terms of purchase rate.
We wrote a blog about this last year: see how it works for yourself.
Jérôme de Guigné, founder and CEO of e-Comas, says: “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
“Great to see the tremendous results our clients are getting from Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s a big cost attached to offering deals and putting ads in front of shoppers, so making sure it actually pays off and gives a good ROI takes a lot of hard work behind the scenes: organising inventory, optimising content and keywords, then of course reading and analysing the data we get from AMC to make sure our advertising is as efficient and optimised as possible.
“Well done to all of the e-Comets for what they’ve achieved for our fantastic brands.”
Join us on Friday 6 December at 7Learnings’ interactive webinar session on Black Friday. Our founder and CEO Jerome will be sharing e-Comas’s learnings and data from Black Friday with the 7Learnings Dynamic Pricing Community. More information here: https://www.linkedin.com/events/blackfridayinsightsfromretailer7262762578236334081