Fastest! 2018 Amazon Black Friday Report

Yesterday was the annual feast for Amazon and all online and offline sellers - "Black Friday"

The biggest difference between this year's peak season and previous years is that it is unusually sluggish. Until yesterday (even for some friends, it was the same yesterday), the order volume was almost the same as usual.

So how is the situation now after Black Friday? Alice collected some front-line data to let everyone take a look at the situation of this year's Black Friday.

First, let’s take a look at the Black Friday situation in the United States.

Okay, we won’t look at the offline aspect. Black Friday itself is an offline carnival shopping festival that later extended to online e-commerce. Let’s skip it and take a look at the online situation.

As of 10 a.m. Eastern Time, online sales on Black Friday reached $643 million. Adobe expects online sales on Black Friday to reach $6.4 billion throughout the day.

Amazon also announced on the afternoon of Black Friday that consumers' purchases on that day had set a historical record, and it took only 9 hours for the number of items sold on the platform to exceed the level of last year's Black Friday.

Amazon has sold more than one million toys and 700,000 fashion items so far, and the platform also released a list of the most popular products so far, including the third-generation Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick 4K TV stick, Fire 7 tablet, 8-quart pressure cooker, Gray 4Ever Extend2Fit convertible car seat and Blu-ray Harry Potter complete set.

Isn’t it shocking? After reading about Black Friday from Amazon’s perspective, let’s get down to earth and see how real sellers reflected this year’s Black Friday.

Alice received less than ideal feedback from sellers. Except for the US site, the German site, which was a dark horse in the peak season last year, also did some promotion for the Black Friday event on the homepage this year. Judging from the LD progress, the overall performance was slightly better than that of the US site. But it was still not ideal.

In addition, the European site also had a strike during the critical moment of Black Friday. About 600 Amazon employees went on a 24-hour strike at the call of the Verdi services union in Germany, demanding improvements to work procedures and better treatment.

▲The high workload during Black Friday was the direct cause of the strike

From this perspective, it is basically certain that the performance of this Black Friday will not be as good as in previous years. The traffic is slightly higher than usual, but the number of sellers who doubled their orders is still a minority. So why is the actual response of sellers so bleak when the official data of Amazon is so good?

A big reason for this is that most of the high-quality traffic on the platforms is allocated to brand sellers who perform well on a daily basis. Although their overall traffic is not as good as in previous Black Fridays, the order volume is not small because the traffic is more accurate.

This shows that as Amazon matures and improves, the platform has begun to show the Matthew effect. That is, sellers with excellent sales and good performance in normal times can get more traffic and achieve better sales results in the peak season; while sellers with poor sales performance in normal times will not be able to participate in the peak season, and the already small amount of traffic will be allocated to the former.

In the post-Amazon era, brand and profit are the only way out for third-party sellers. The low-profit and low-price product strategy is destined to be gradually eliminated. The sluggish performance of Black Friday this time is just a signal. Of course, as an offline promotional event, Black Friday’s mediocre online performance is also expected. Everyone can look forward to the next Cyber ​​Monday. Alice predicts that the effect of this Cyber ​​Monday may be a surprise.