With online sales having overtaken cash purchases on Black Friday, web-based retailers, with logistical and support companies, are pulling out all the stops in preparation.
No longer taking place over just one day, preparations for what the online retail industry has dubbed "Black Five Day" begin almost as soon as the last one is over. For online retailers, it starts on Black Friday and carries on until the next Tuesday. And they include huge investments in workforce and technology capacity.
Companies do everything from increasing and specially training their staff and bringing in engineers and developers to optimise customer experience. The result is a span of less than a week that accounts for around one-third of annual sales for many retailers.
"There's 38% more sales made now than in the Christmas period which is traditionally the big spending period," said Brandon Aitken, account director at business process outsourcing company Webhelp.
"Black Friday has effectively disrupted the retail market starting in the US and UK, but now we see it in South Africa. From a company point of view this - October to December - is what we call the golden quarter."
Aitken, whose company services major online retail companies in the UK from offices across South Africa, said they increased their staff by 1,000 to 3500 for Black Friday.
Only people with a good temperament were recruited to the Webhelp call centre to deal with the "elevated level of customer anxiety" during the sale period. "We recruit and assess people with that kind of temperament to deal with the customer anxiety," Aitken said.
"Generally we receive about 120,000 calls per week but that goes up by an additional 85,000 calls during Black Friday weekend and 28,000 more on Black Friday.
"It takes very careful planning and we start talking about it in April and then formulate a plan by June. We run this as an event."
Chief marketing officer at online retailer Takealot Julie-Anne Walsh said resources were bolstered across the company for Black Friday. Takealot made R1-million in its first Black Friday in 2012 and it expects to make between R80-million and R130-million this year.
"We spend the entire year preparing for this period," Walsh said. "We have to ensure our site can handle the five-fold increase in traffic and that the payment mechanisms stay up."
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