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The traditional Black Friday landscape in 2020 was
dramatically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cramming shoppers into stores became an unsafe
prospect. Retailers had to pivot quickly to doing everything
online – not just on Black Friday, but for the whole October
to December shopping season.
For retailers, this meant operating in one of the most
challenging seasons ever as traditional 'one day' sales
evolved from a single 'Black Friday' event to a multi-month
season.
When surges hit; 65% of retailers were
unable to meet demand
Basic search capabilities
Added to this, retailers were dealing with shipping delays
and supply chain issues. Against this backdrop, digital
commerce exploded; Algolia saw 4.5 billion search queries
peaking at 7.2 million queries per minute on Black Friday
alone. Putting this in context, this translates to 85% increase
in search queries compared to Black Friday in 2019.
These search queries turned into a surprising increase in
spending during the 2020 Black Friday weekend of $14.3
billion, up from $11.9 billion in 2019. But it was not all rosy.
65% of respondents found that their ability to meet the
demand needed to be better handled, 47% were unable to
scale to meet the demand, and 25% wanted to be able to
iterate and merchandise better.
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