5 insights on the 2018 edition of Black Friday by Foxintelligence

3 min readNov 29, 2018

A week after the 2018 Black Friday edition, let’s take a look back to what happened in the e-commerce industry last week ¹. And it seems that this time, Amazon was not the winner.

1- The French websites’ revenge ?

French merchants ² are the clear winners of this 2018 Black Friday edition. Cdiscount and Fnac-Darty performed noticeably well: they respectively gained 5 and 7 percentage points of market shares compared to their respective regular market shares.

2- Pre-Black Week sales did not challenge the predominance of the Friday

This year, sales started on the Monday 19 November, 4 days before the actual Black Friday. But it did not impact noticeably the sales breakdown across the days of the Black Friday period, consumption still peaked on the Friday: the 2018 edition of Black Friday concentrated 28% of the total sales generated on the entire Black Friday period.

3- High-Tech & Video Games remain top categories in 2018, and Fashion is catching up

During the 2018 edition of Black Friday Days, High-Tech remained the top category in terms of sales: it represented 43% of the total sales, and gained 7 percentage points compared to the 2017 edition. Fashion is quickly progressing (+5pp compared to 2017), winning shares over Games & Toys but especially over IT.

4- Black Friday is driving the price ranges up

Benefiting from advantageous discounts during Black Friday, customers were driven towards significatively more expensive items than during normal periods. Items priced 200€ and more represented 44% of the revenue generated during the Black Friday sales; it is a 14 percentage point increase compared to the month before.

5- The ‘Fabrique à Histoires’ is still a must-have in 2018

For the second year in a row, the ‘Fabrique à Histoires’ by Lunii has been the best selling product in volume. Among the top-ten products bought during the Black Friday, four were High-tech items, reflecting the category’s overwhelming dominance.

Thanks to Capucine Columelli

Footnotes:

(1): The merchants considered for this study are: Amazon, Cdiscount, Asos, Boulanger, Darty, Fnac, La Redoute, PriceMinister, Sarenza, ShowroomPrivé, Vente Privée and Zalando.

(2): In this article:

“Black week” will be defined as the days before the Black Friday (from Monday to Thursday);
“Black Friday sales” will be defined as sales between the Black Friday and Cyber Monday;
Black Friday is only one day of sale.

About Foxintelligence

Foxintelligence delivers the best insights on the latest European e-commerce trends, by unlocking intelligence from hundreds of merchants and thousands of brands’ e-receipts thanks to a panel of millions of online shoppers. We transform the panel industry as a service, at the service of business leaders and marketing professionals who want to drive growth with the most accurate and freshest competitive and consumer information.