Blog > November 2011

Welcome to the Friday#
This week in The Sizzle:  Groupon shares fall below IPO. The Fri-Up: Black Friday. The Sauce: Nickelblocker glory..

The Sizzle

• Cyber criminals go after online Black Friday shoppers
• Nokia Siemens to cut 1/4 of its staff
• China overtakes US in Smartphone market
• Kinect controller coming to Windows
• Groupon shares fall below IPO
• Spooks target suspects through iTunes

The Fri-Up

Black Friday: a groovy Kindle love

Although we haven’t adopted the celebration of Thanksgiving in the UK, we do seem to have adopted the Black Friday sales which traditionally follow the US annual holiday. Amazon has arguably provoked the most excitement online, with their five day Black Friday sale.  The sale started on Monday in the UK and the US (with the promise of Cyber Monday reaching our European cousins after the weekend). The sale consists of a seemingly unending series of timed deals lasting for around two hours each. Some good, some bad.

Last year, Amazon suffered a lot of criticism surrounding the fact that people had no idea whether the deal had already expired, or what their chances of getting a bargain were. As a result many felt they’d missed out on all the deals altogether.

This year, the online retail giant has taken measures to prevent more frustration, labelling each deal with a percentage of stock gone so far and allowing a waitlist for popular items. The waitlist kicks into action in the event that those who initially bagged the deal did not make it to the check-out in time, these items are then made available to those first in the queue.

Fig 1. History graph of Amazon’s Black Friday sales

Click graph to see full size

The history graph clearly demonstrates Amazon’s ability to sustain interest in their deals throughout the week, with people even clamouring to share and discuss deals throughout family Thanksgiving celebrations yesterday.

Thursday’s notable peak was provoked by an offer on a MacBook Air available to US deal hunters.

This kind of timed landgrab does seem to succeed in sales, often whipping people into a competitive frenzy to buy items they didn’t even want. Personally, I’d be staggered if you needed a waitlist for adults to get a £20 tub of rather nasty looking boiled sweets for the knockdown price of £13.16 – but we’re nearly at that point!

Let’s take a look at the wordcloud:

Fig 2. Wordcloud associated with Amazon’s Black Friday deals

Click the image to see full size

The irony of the hotly tipped sale, is that despite the deals, despite the frenzy and despite my query specifying that only Black Friday deals should linked with Amazon in the query, the only product appearing significantly within the wordcloud is Amazon’s Kindle – which has never been part of the Black Friday sales or on sale at all.

It just goes to show, if you make a good product in the first place it will be popular, you don’t need a sale!

The Sauce

Something for the weekend:

• Man running after his dog in Richmond Park – cue invetiable parodies
• Fans of Chad Kroeger, look away now. Need a Nickelblocker? keep reading. 
• Angry emails ‘a threat to traditional bollockings‘

Hope you enjoyed the Friday#, have a great weekend.

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