Black Friday: What is the channel opportunity?
Black Friday spending expected to hit £2bn this year
For the second year in a row, many UK stores have been empty at midnight on Black Friday as shoppers opt to stay at home and shop online rather than embrace carnage in supermarkets and department stores.
The Black Friday phenomenon seemingly peaked in 2014, when media coverage showed frenzied shoppers battling it out for cheap televisions and tablets, while last year shoppers opted to spend £1.1bn online and avoid playing Supermarket Sweep.
This year, the Black Friday period has been extended to a week-long bonanzza culminating in a weekend of reductions, with research from VoucherCodes.co.uk and the Centre of Retail Research forecasting that spending could hit £2bn - but how has the channel taken advantage this year?
While Misco entered the action early and offered online reductions on items such as printers, laptops, USB sticks and webcams, others chose to ignore the hype, with firms such as Insight - which has joined in in the past - staying quiet on its website and on Twitter.
Carl West, supply chain director at GfK, explained that he wouldn't expect to see a massive jump in sales in the B2B sector over the period, particularly in terms of contracted sales, but added the channel does have the opportunity to use Black Friday as a marketing vehicle.
"This is an end-user retail phenomenon but clearly because of the marketing value of Black Friday this has moved over to the B2B side," he said.
"No one makes a tonne of money on this, I can assure you but it gets a lot of customers in and gets people interested."
"If you're looking at somebody who services bespoke IT equipment outside of contracts, they have an opportunity to maximise on this as well.
"We are all end-user consumers and when we go into the business workplace we take some of that with us, so Black Friday has grown in the sense of the B2B sector - but the focus has been on the more bespoke, ad-hoc purchases of IT equipment rather than contract sales."
Alex Tatham (pictured), managing director at Westcoast told CRN that the focus has shifted this year from retail to e-tail, and explained that the bulk of Westcoast's Black Friday activity will be behind the scenes, supporting the likes of Very and HP Store with logistics and deliveries.
He said that although sometimes it can appear that Black Friday deals across all industries are hastily put together to sell unwanted stock, Westcoast actually started negotiating its deals in July.
"Just like last year it's an online phenomenon," he said. "Online, it's gone mental.
"We are geared up all weekend to deliver on behalf of a lot of online partners to who we put in a whole bunch of Black Friday deals and they will all ship over the course of the next four days.
"[The deals are] not necessarily on our site, this is for e-tailers largely that we support with back-office services, so we do all of their shipping and delivering for them. If you see the stuff on Very, or HP store, or Argos - a lot of that stuff comes from Westcoast and is delivered by Westcoast on their behalf."
Tatham went on to say that Black Friday is of no benefit to the B2B channel and that actually firms struggle to make any money out of the phenomenon. Instead, he claimed, it is a "customer acquisition day" as suppliers look to generate new business relationships and follow up with non-discounted sales.
"There are some Black Friday deals that we've got that are available to resellers, because want to make sure that no one misses out on some of the deals that we've negotiated, [but] I can't say that I've got a massive Black Friday discount on anything that is B2B - these are all consumer products and it's a consumer phenomenon."
"No one makes a tonne of money on this, I can assure you but it gets a lot of customers in and gets people interested.
Nigel Morris, director at Beta Distribution agreed that Black Friday does not create a massive opportunity for value-added resellers, but claimed that a lot of the distributor's office product resellers will make impulse buys.
With this in mind, he said that a week-long Black Friday deal suits distributors because their resellers have time to choose the offers they want to take to their customers.
"A lot of [resellers] are in the value-add [market] and it's not for them, but quite a lot of our office products dealers will take advantage of these sorts of things because a LaCie drive or a Verbatim product is a product that somebody will buy because it's cheaper on that day [which they might not otherwise]" he said.
"It's not like a retailer who in the last six weeks of the year does 50 per cent of their sales, it's nothing like that, but what it does do is creates a bit of interest and it does give us the opportunity to make some genuinely good offers."