E-commerce Volumes Spiked 23% During Black Friday Sales: Unicommerce

The global shopping phenomenon, Black Friday, continues to make waves in India. Unicommerce, one of India’s leading e-commerce enablement SaaS platforms, based on the orders processed on its platform, conducted an analysis of the Black Friday weekend, revealing a sharp 23% increase in e-commerce order volumes as compared to the Black Friday sale weekend of 2022.

Black Friday, traditionally an American retail tradition, has firmly cemented its place in the Indian market as a major e-commerce sale event, with consumers extending their post-Diwali shopping spree to benefit from Black Friday and related sales like Cyber Monday etc.

While during the Diwali festive sales, marketplace growth outpaced D2C brands, the trend was reversed during the Black Friday weekend. During the Black Friday weekend, brand websites reported robust growth, with order volumes rising by 28% during the weekend. The marketplaces reported a relatively lower growth of 19%. The growing popularity of Black Friday has made it a crucial sales period for both online marketplaces and individual brands in India. 

The Black Friday weekend brought cheers for online sellers - over 8.5 million order items demand received on the Unicommerce platform during the 2023 Black Friday sale weekend. Unicommerce received an average of 1500 orders of item demand every minute. More than 10 sellers received demand for over 100,000 orders items during the four-day weekend, and over 100 sellers received demand for more than 10,000 orders items through the Unicommerce platform.

The Black Friday surge was not limited to metro cities alone, The Tier III cities reported the highest growth of 43%, followed by 19% growth for Tier I cities and 16% in Tier II cities.

Fashion and beauty products maintained their status as the dominant categories during the Black Friday sale, continuing to attract a significant portion of consumer interest. Additionally, there was a noticeable uptick in volumes for FMCG and eyewear segments, indicating a diversification in consumer preferences during the sale season.

The platform witnessed brands across segments processing their e-commerce orders through its platform to seamlessly manage the spike in order volumes and great shopping experience to consumers.

Unicommerce’s e-commerce enablement Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) platform enables end-to-end management of e-commerce operations for marketplaces, brands, sellers and logistics service provider firms.