Some retailers have Cyber Monday sales, others have extended their Black Friday offers. Photo / File
Some retailers have Cyber Monday sales, others have extended their Black Friday offers. Photo / File
New Zealanders spent a record $652 million over the Black Friday weekend.
On Black Friday itself Kiwi retailers raked in $253m and a further $399m through the weekend, according to Paymark, which processes about 75 per cent of electronic transactions.
About 90 per cent of this was spent in physicalshops.
The spend on Black Friday dwarfed the $63.8m spent on Boxing Day last year and the only day that's been bigger in the last year was the Thursday before Easter, totalling $263m in sales.
Retailers use Black Friday, which falls a day after Thanksgiving, as a way to get rid of unwanted stock at discounted prices. The name stems from a convention that shops' accounts go from red for the year to being in the black.
Cyber Monday was born about five years ago, a shopping day created by retailers in the United States to encourage people to shop online and has since spread to this country.
But is it redundant given just how many shoppers are already choosing to spend online throughout the year and during Black Friday?
Many retailers in this country are no longer advertising Cyber Monday discounts, instead their sales are running until December 3 or a couple of days after.
About 8.9 per cent of New Zealand's total retail spend is already conducted online, and this percentage is growing. This is forecast to be closer to 10 per cent as it is in Australia in the next couple of years.
Black Friday was the biggest ever for online sales in the US, as fewer people hit stores. Shoppers rang up US$7.4 billion ($11.5b) in transactions from their phones, computers and tablets, according to Adobe Analytics.
The number of people through shops in the US was down 2.5 per cent on Black Friday compared with the year earlier.
Wilkinson said fewer shoppers than he had anticipated were in New Zealand stores over the weekend, but he believed more transactions would have been conducted online this year.
Discounts of 40 and 50 per cent were perceived as good deals by shoppers, though many were increasingly becoming more planned around their purchases, Wilkinson said.
"These headline deals were resonating well with consumers, and they almost set the benchmark, anything less was not cutting it with people," Wilkinson told the Herald.
"In the last couple of years there's been a focus on people going into stores [expecting to be surprised], this year, they have been aware of it coming, and there was a strong lead-up to it and lots of retailers were trying to get the pip on each other.
Michelle Anderson, chief digital officer at The Warehouse Group. Photo / Supplied
"Because of early [Black Friday] sales, because of the emphasis around the weekend and the natural inclination to spend on the weekend and with the much less inclination to spend on a Monday.
"Cyber Monday, there's a lot more relevance in the United States because of the fact that you've come off the back of the holiday period and the culture, over here, shopping on Monday, the mindset isn't necessarily in the same space."
When Cyber Monday first made its debut in New Zealand, online was not as widely used and popular as it is today.
"It's just business as usual."
Many shoppers would have made the most of the last days of customs duty this Black Friday, before GST was added to items under $1000 from December 1, Wilkinson said.
Tariff duties and cost recovery charges no longer apply to orders under $1001. Items that cost between $400 and $1000 could end up costing less than before, while items under $400 will likely cost more as they are subject to GST.
The Black Friday weekend was Noel Leeming's biggest online sales week ever. Photo / Screenshot
Wilkinson said the change in law would likely encourage shoppers to buy locally online. He said he expected significant growth in online shopping to occur within the grocery and staple product categories in line with uptake in international markets.
New Zealand's biggest retailer The Warehouse says online traffic across its retail chains The Warehouse, Noel Leeming, Warehouse Stationery and Torpedo7 increased by 19 per cent over the Black Friday weekend.
Black Friday through the weekend and so far into Cyber Monday had been the group's largest trading period of the year, company chief digital officer Michelle Anderson said.
Torpedo7, Noel Leeming and 1-Day have had their largest online sales week ever due to Black Friday. The top online sellers were pools, Lego, electronics and bikes.
Warehouse subsidiary TheMarket experienced a 377 per cent increase in sales compared with a regular trading day on Black Friday. Chief executive Justus Wilde said the e-commerce site expected its Black Friday weekend sales to exceed that of Boxing Day.
