Seasonal & Christmas shopping 2017

If you’d posted the biggest trading day in your company’s history would you say you’d rather the event that precipitated it didn’t exist?

That was the reaction of Sir Charlie Mayfield, chairman of John Lewis (the department store that is held dear in the hearts of millions of British consumers), to Black Friday, now well and truly entrenched in the global retail landscape.

Bucking the trend of competitors and the wider sector which is struggling to compete with a myriad of challenging conditions, not least Amazon’s inexorable rise, John Lewis posted year-on-year growth approaching 4%.

Occurring annually on the day following Thanksgiving in late November, the event has cemented itself as a shopping phenomenon. 2017 was no exception with Awin recording never-before-seen numbers as more and more of the markets we operate in embraced the day and wider weekend, bookended by Cyber Monday.

The impact of Black Friday can only be truly appreciated in the wider context of peak trading. It was only a few years ago that the natural bedfellow for Christmas shopping was the month it fell in. But with a relatively new event setting up camp in November, the reverberations are being felt in the logistical challenges it creates.

How then did the success of Black Friday impact Christmas trading across December? Is the now pre-eminent retail event simply pulling consumer interest ever earlier, displacing traditional peak performance? Besides the calendar and timing impact, what additional granular insights can we ascertain from the affiliate data across Awin's global network of more than 6,000 affiliate programmes?