Black Friday more than doubled sales in Baltic online stores

Black Friday shopping holiday, although originating from USA, has also gained more and more popularity in the Baltic states. According to ecommerce payment solution Montonio, compared to regular Friday transactions in online stores more than doubled on Black Friday.

Although Black Friday should be just one day, there were a lot of online stores offering discounts for the weekend or even the whole week. Montonio’s data indicated that compared to a regular week, there were more transactions each day of the Black Friday week, but most of the purchases were still made on the 25th of November aka Black Friday. 

Montonio’s co-founder and CEO Markus Lember explained that people are preparing for Christmas earlier and earlier each year. “November is already an active Christmas shopping time in the baltic states and thanks to discount campaigns like Black Friday you can save quite a substantial amount of money on gifts. 20% of discount is the minimum discount customers are expecting, but online shops that offered 30% discounts or more definitely got more attention and made bigger sales.”

People were buying more expensive products on Black Friday: the average order value in Estonian and Latvian online stores increased by 20% and in Lithuania, the increase was a whopping 70% compared to a regular Friday. “This year the most popular items were TVs, phones and gaming consoles,” commented online store Bigbox manager Edgaras Pilius. “Big and small home appliances, cosmetics and beauty products and toys followed-up.”

Lember added: “Black Friday sales are quite remarkable in the Baltics states. In Lithuania, online transactions doubled, in Estonia and Latvia there were over 2,5 times the amount of transactions compared to a regular Friday. The numbers show that online shopping has been increasing and will be increasing even more in the coming years.” 

For Bigbox and other online stores, Black Friday is the biggest campaign of the year and a kick-start for Christmas sale. “Regardless of pessimistic prognosis from economists regarding shrinkage of retail sales, inflation and other factors, this year our Black Friday sales grew 40% in Lithuania, 200% in Latvia and 10% in Estonia, compared to last year’s campaign,” commented Pilius.

Interestingly, the Estonian local online sales campaign E-smaspäev (E-Monday in Estonian) was even more popular than Black Friday, with 24% more transactions. “It is very nice to hear this,” commented Tõnu Väät, head of the Estonian E-commerce Union, which organizes E-Monday. “I think that the strength of E-Monday is coordination – the campaign lasts only 24 hours and all the offers are together on one page. On the last E-Monday, almost 60,000 people visited the campaign page within 24 hours. If you make a very good offer to the consumer, you will sell well regardless of the campaign name.” 

Montonio provides payment links, card payments, automatic shipping label printing and instalment solutions for online stores and focuses on improving the user experience of shopping carts. Montonio’s services are currently used by over 5,000 online stores in the Baltics, Finland and Poland.