Takealot takes almost R200m on Black Friday despite site glitch

What recession? South Africans flocked to malls and online stores in their numbers looking for Black Friday deals.

Similar to last year, this Friday saw hordes of bargain hunters coming out to get discounts of up to 50% and 90% in some cases.  The historically American tradition of Black Friday is the last Friday of November.

The total value of transactions for online retailer Takealot amounted to more than R196m on Black Friday this year.

What products got customers to part with their hard earned Randelas?

This year’s top sellers were the Tommy Hilfiger Girl For Her perfume for the second year running and the Nu Camp folding table.

“We are humbled by the incredible support from our customers on our biggest sales day of the year. Black Friday is a great opportunity for first time shoppers to trial online shopping and this year we saw a record number of new buyers make the most of the deals on offer,” said CEO Kim Reid. 

The Black Friday concept was first adopted by online store Takealot and Checkers in 2012 and 2014. Despite being the trailblazer of the year’s biggest shopping day, Takealot was also hit with major glitches – a second year in a row.

Last year, the entire site crashed and customers were unable to make purchases. This year, at 1am on Friday, an apology was issued after complaints that customers were unable to make payments.

While Black Friday 2017 brought with it some chaos with stores being damaged and online sites crashing, this year there was a sense of calm and order at stores across the country.

Makro extended their Black Friday specials to run over a five-day period, which started on Wednesday and ends Sunday. The busiest Makro stores were in Gauteng, the Woodmead branch and in Namibia.

Some of the most popular items were the LG 75’ Super UHD TV, Samsung 65’ Smart Curved UHD LED TV, Hisense 516l side-by-side fridge/freezer, DEFY 7kg front load washing machine, PS4 1TB console and the Megamaster origin series 5-burner gas braai.

The combination of the folding camping table and the gas braai indicates South Africans are gearing up for a very festive December.

For those 'staycationers', the best selling toy to keep the young ones busy was was the Jeronimo My First sewing machine, and the best selling book was Prooi by local author Fanie Viljoen.

The annual Takealot Blue Dot sale went live at 12:01 on Friday morning, raking in more than R11.5m worth of transactions in the first hour.