As mentioned in yesterday’s post, Black Friday is becoming popular in my country as well. I have waaaaaaay too much “stuff” as it is, so I don’t really need any new gadgets/TVs/whatever right now but as an entrepreneur, observing the phenomenon and comparing it to the US version was interesting to say the least.

Three observations:

1) in my city and I’d say in most places, there wasn’t all that much “offline” excitement and, instead, people simply ordered (or tried to order) online

2) there were a handful of large businesses which had heavily advertised Black Friday campaigns and in ALL cases, the websites were down due to an avalanche of traffic – again, in ALL cases and this still makes it clear that these businesses still have a lot to learn when it comes to this Internet thing 🙂

3) in most cases, the “discounts” were just marketing ploys – in other words, the prices were increased a few days before the Black Friday offers and then a discount was applied to the increased prices, the actual discount was pretty low in most cases and the deals weren’t nearly as good as those offered by US companies

Hope you found these observations interesting!