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Early reports indicate that Black Friday retail sales volumes are up slightly over 2008 as expected, though discounting has been heavy. Deal focused consumers have been searching for offers, sales and promotions like never before. This chart from Trendistic shows searches for the term ‘sale’ during November peaking at three quarters of a percent of the entire Twittersphere on Friday 27th and up by 174% week over week.

This was dwarfed by Tweets including the term Black Friday which peaked at 2:00 p.m. ET on Friday 2.74% of the Twittersphere, up a massive 2,944% over the previous Friday.

So as expected, social media has played an important role in distributing Black Friday promotions. The next fastest-growing Tweet on Friday was ‘Free Shipping,’ which peaked at 467% growth compared with the previous week, equivalent to over 6,000 tweets per hour.
 

Research has shown that Free Shipping is the single most demanded promotion of ecommerce teams, and only one week ago, ecommerce teams were holding back, more focused on discounts. But Free Shipping was big on Friday as expected.

The impact this had on the conversion rate was positive, bringing the rate back to annual norms. SeeWhy tracks the conversion and abandonment rates, and we have been concerned about steadily rising abandonment rates leading up to Black Friday. The Abandonment Rate for October averaged 71%, an all-time high for 2009. Over the last week, the rate has dropped back to close to the annual average as customers have responded to promotional offers and started shopping in earnest. The average for the Black Friday week was 65%, peaking on Wednesday at 70%.
 

Looking at seasonal trends, normally the abandonment rate for Black Friday should be lower than the annual average: this is when the big sales and promotional offers kick in. So it’s clear that customers are looking for deals and ready to abandon if they don’t find them. This is a worrying trend, since it reinforces the changes in customer behaviour seen throughout 2009: deal focused and unwilling to compromise.

The Black Friday week is far from typical, of course, as Wednesday is traditionally a very big travel day. This is reflected in the lowest transaction volumes of the week relative to the peak on Friday.

Of surprise to many is that online Thanksgiving sales were 86% relative to Friday’s peak sales volume, as customers found time to shop online. This trend started on the evening of Wednesday and then dipped around lunchtime, and peaked again on Thanksgiving Day in the evening at 9:00 p.m. ET as customers aimed to get ahead of the Black Friday Sales.
 

Of course, despite the positive growth over 2008, abandonment rates are still too high: higher than they should be for this time of the year and overall too high for the year. In 2010, it looks unlikely that the cautious deal-focused customer is going away, so abandonment remarketing is going to be key in the next 12 months.

If you’d like to find out more about optimizing website conversion or recovering abandoned shopping carts, have a look at our Abandonment Tracker solution.