Insight, Westcoast and VIP pursue Black Friday bonanza

Bargain hunters face 30-minute delay to get on Currys website due to high demand

Channel firms are hoping to cash in on Black Friday as the once-US-only tradition takes root in the UK.

Reseller Insight - which is headquartered in the US where the post-Thanksgiving tradition first started - is offering customers discounts on laptops, tablets and printers throughout today in a bid to help "make your IT budget go further this Christmas".

Westcoast has unveiled a flurry of offers on HP kit that include end-user cashback, and fellow distie VIP Computer Centre has got in on the action too, offering up to 87 per cent off certain products.

Trustmarque's marketing manager, Mark Boorman, said he had been inundated with Black Friday deals.

"If I had a pound for ever #BlackFriday email I'd received in the last 48 hours I'd be a rich man," he tweeted.

Avnet's sales director, Laura Bouchard, agreed: "It's before 8am and I have already received 13 #BlackFriday offer emails!!! #blackfridaydeals," she tweeted.

Dixons Carphone's head of social media, Mark Webb, said the frenzy is spreading fast.

"[Black Friday] will overtake Easter as the second-biggest event," he said.

"Over a million clicks are expected on Black Friday - Christmas Day levels.

"Stores are opening early at 8am [and] it is spreading in the Nordics too - it was online only there last year [but it is] now in-store there too."

But customers looking to bag a bargain on the Dixons-owned Currys website were faced with delays of more than 30 minutes just to get on the site this morning due to the high demand (pictured).

TechMarketView's research director Angela Eager said companies have a lot to learn when it comes to coping with high levels of web traffic.

"It illustrates how difficult it is to accurately forecast demand - which may provide a boost for analytics software sales during 2015," she said on the HotViews blog.

"But [it] also raises questions over the reality (or not) of spinning up cloud-compute capacity on demand, in response to real-time, high-volume events. There will be some interesting discussions come the post mortem.

"With Cyber Monday just days away, there is not much time to learn, resolve and implement."