Brisk sales over Black Friday weekend
Sales up for both online and brick-and-mortar shops
This year's Black Friday weekend, late last month, saw shoppers flock to online and brick-and-mortar shops to snag some good buys, with stores in Singapore pulling out all the stops to attract consumers.
Aside from offering various promotions, retailers like Robinsons, Sephora and Metro also extended their opening hours and it seems like their efforts have paid off, with retailers The Straits Times spoke to reporting higher Black Friday sales compared with last year.
Online marketplace Qoo10, which started having Black Friday sales last year, recorded a sales value of $10.1 million for the Black Friday weekend between Nov 24 and 26 - surpassing last year's sales by more than 50 per cent.
During Lazada's Black Friday sale from Nov 24 to 27, shoppers were offered promotions of up to 80 per cent off and flash deals.
Lazada Singapore's chief executive Alexis Lanternier said sales this year were three times more than last year's.
Lazada had its first Black Friday sale in 2015.
"Despite the early hour, shoppers went on a shopping frenzy in the first hour of Black Friday, with sales 13 times that of the first hour of a regular day."
Electronics have been a hit over the years, with smartphones selling particularly well this year. Top-selling products included the Xiaomi Mi A1, Samsung Galaxy J5 Prime and OnePlus 5.
They proved popular at brick-and-mortar retailers too.
A spokesman for Robinsons department store said: "This is our biggest year thus far and we witnessed a growth in our sales this year as compared with last year."
The store, which did not provide sales figures, offered discounts of as much as 80 per cent. It said some of the most popular items were home and electrical appliances, cosmetics and bedding products.
Courts Singapore's country chief executive Ben Tan said that online sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday grew almost 100 per cent from last year.
And there was a sales "uplift" for its brick-and-mortar stores as well, though the home electronics, IT and furniture retailer did not provide figures.
Meta-search website iPrice Group, which analysed Google Trends, said the e-commerce sites that had the most search interest from people in Singapore in the last half-hour of Nov 23 were Lazada, Amazon, Qoo10 and ezbuy.
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