The big day is here: Black Friday, and South African consumers are lining up to buy something they have been wishing for the whole year.
Black Friday dawned over South Africa, with quite a few consumers already shopping online before 8:00 in the morning. With most of the country under gloomy skies with lots of rain expected, it remains to be seen if bad weather will deter local consumers from buying everything they have an eye on.
We use two dashboards to track Black Friday spending: one from Peach Payments, an African payment gateway, and the Discovery dashboard, which shows how people spend with their Discovery cards and miles.
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Black Friday shopping according to Peach Payments
According to the Peach Payments dashboard, it handled 491 660 transactions by 13:00. The highest amount for a single transaction was three for R100 000 just before 13:00, while another consumer spent R100 000 at 12:35 and another spent R77 000 at 12:33.
The most popular payment methods were, in order of use, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Pay by Bank and Payflex, followed by other payment methods.
The merchant transactions by province show that Capetonians were shopping in the day, making up 64.9% of the Peach Payments transactions, with Gauteng at 34.23%. The other provinces were all at less than 1% during the morning.
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Black Friday shopping, according to Discovery
The Discovery dashboard takes a bit longer to update, but by 11:00, the average in-store card transaction value spent was R455, while the average online card transaction value was R969. The largest single transaction on a Discovery card was for R500 000.
Top 10 in-store merchants by total Discovery card spend value were Woolworths, followed by Spar, Dis-Chem, Clicks, Hirsch’s, Makro, Sorbet, Edgars, iStore and Builders Warehouse. The Top 10 in-store merchants by number of total card purchases were Spar, followed by Woolworths, Pick n Pay, Checkers, Clicks, Dis-Chem, OK Foods, Shoprite, Mr Price and Food Lovers’ Market.
Top 10 online merchants by total card spent value are Takealot, followed by Amazon, Checkers Sixty60, One Day Only, Dermastore, Woolworths Dash, Superbalist, Makro, Temu and Bash. The Top 10 online merchants by number of total card purchases were Checkers Sixty60, followed by Takealot, Temu, Amazon, One Day Only, Woolworths Dash, Superbalist, Bash, Dermastore and Shein.
The two Chinese retailers that seemed to be taking over online shopping in South Africa over the past year, Temu and Shein, were not high on the Top 10 lists. Shein only featured at number 10 for online merchants by number of total card purchases, while Temu did better with ninth place for online merchants’ total card spend value and third place for number of total card purchases.
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What are South Africans buying on Black Friday?
According to the Discovery dashboard, they are spending by total card spend on food and drink (17% of spend value) followed by recreation (16%), transport and travel (11%), home (10%) and health and personal care (9%).
By total card purchases, consumers using a Discovery card bought food and drink (40% of spend value), transport and travel (16%), recreation (10%), health and personal care (5%) and home (4%).
