Black Friday Russian Edition on the example of Audiomania

Historically, many good things in Russia are borrowed from the West. At the same time, however, by default it is considered that domestic specificity manifests itself almost always, and in the end, everything is good and smooth only “there”. Quite a lot was written about “Black Friday” - a large-scale day of sales, which took place in December 2013, and a significant number of comments boiled down to the fact that discounts (if they were) were far from being the most popular and sought-after items. On Habré there were even relevant statistical studies on this topic.

In principle, such statements are not meaningless, but we believe that everything was not so bad, and we want to tell you about our experience of participating in this large-scale sales day. Under the cut is our report on the results of participation of Audiomania in "Black Friday 2013".

Special features

We prepared 377 commodity items for participation in the promotion - discounts were offered only on those goods that were actually present at the warehouse. The amount of discounts on some of them reached 53% (more on this below), which caused a significant interest of the audience to the event.
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The website traffic www.audiomania.ru during the campaign (December 6, 2013) was 5 thousand unique visitors per hour. The peak of attendance fell on the first hours of the sale: the site was accessed by up to several hundred visitors per minute. We noted an increase in traffic from social networks: Facebook and VKontakte on Black Friday gave several hundred direct transitions. Increased search traffic. What is interesting, despite the problems in the work of the site blackfriday2013.ru, which was unavailable during the first hours of the action, according to the results of the day of sales from it to our site, about 8.5 thousand transitions were made.

Statistics

During Black Friday, we received 4 times more orders than the average over the previous few days. Only in the first two hours of December 6, a little less than 100 orders were issued. Online conversion has increased by 3 times, but with it the number of failures has also increased: this figure is usually less than 1%, and on the day of sales, it has almost doubled. For example, users from regions refused to buy, because of the impossibility of its payment by cash on delivery or by bank transfer. The overwhelming majority of orders (68%) on December 6 were made by new customers who had never previously acquired anything from Audiomania. By the way, on ordinary days, the ratio of new and regular customers is, as a rule, 50:50.

As for the geographical distribution of traffic, the majority of visitors were Muscovites (56%) - their number was almost three times higher than usual. The growth of traffic from other cities was not so noticeable: for example, from St. Petersburg, where we also have shops, about 11% of visitors came. But residents of very small settlements (the names of which were often not even in our database) made up as much as 6% of the audience - in general, the number of visitors from small towns on the day of sales increased to 400%.

Results

The condition for receiving a discount during Black Friday was payment on the day of the order, which led to an unprecedented jump in online payments. Payments through QIWI-wallets exceeded the daily average rate by 910%, via Webmoney - by 580%, with bank cards - by 550%.

The load on the call center of Audiomania on Black Friday increased by 94% compared to the previous week's Friday. The waiting time for answering a call averaged about 4 seconds, at peak times - up to 10 seconds.

It is interesting that during the campaign the number of requests in one form or another containing the name “Audiomania” sharply increased in search engines. The unusual “Black Friday effect” turned out to be unusual here: the number of such requests after the action did not return to their previous values ​​and continues to stay at an unusually high level.

And now, actually, about specific discounts on specific products.

Of the 377 commodity items that participated in the action, 80 were fully purchased (among the fully purchased items were those whose number reached 60 in stock). The most expensive item sold was the floor acoustic system Penaudio Sinfonia with walnut veneer finishing - up to Black Friday it was 795,000 rubles, and on the day of sales the system was sold at a discount of 40% for 477,000 rubles.



Major sales during Black Friday 2013 were in the portable electronics segment. Thinksound and Beats by Dr. Dre and amplifiers for headphones and portable players FiiO - discounts on these products ranged from 35% to 50%.



Headphone Amplifier FiiO E17 ALPEN

The craving for discounts turned out to be no stranger to the state organizations, who ordered several hundred Onetech cables from us, which were sold that day at a 50% discount.

As a result, discounts on audio equipment on the website audiomania.ru reached 53% and were completely real. At the same time, taking into account Audiomania’s focus on products for playing and listening to music, the action extended specifically to those products that are in demand on ordinary days (the same headphones from Dr. Dre, for example). This is indirectly confirmed by the fact that on December 6, traffic from Yandex.Market has increased significantly: customers checked the accuracy of the discounts, and, having already verified their veracity, made the purchase.

As you can see, our experience of participating in Black Friday turned out to be much less dramatic (and more positive) than one might think, relying on general opinions about the event. Let's hope that this story will have a worthy sequel!