UK shoppers set to spend £1.2bn online this Black Friday

UK consumers are set to spend £2.6bn on Black Friday next week, up eight per cent on last year, according to research from VoucherCodes and the Centre for Retail Research.

The sales are forecast to attract 21m customers to UK shops and online stores, spending an average of £1.8m per minute.

The majority of that money will be spent in store, but the gap is getting smaller and smaller. Online spend is up 15 per cent year-on-year, with an estimated 11.6m shoppers expected to spend £1.15bn.

The appeal of shopping online for Black Friday deals is as you’d expect – 68 per cent of surveyed said they were hoping to avoid the high street crowds and 41 per cent to beat the queues.

The top thing that people are shopping for will be gifts for others (23 per cent). The top product categories are clothing (20 per cent) and home electronics (16 per cent).

“Black Friday is no longer just a day of bumper bargain deals, as an increasing number of shoppers are wising up to the phenomenal deals over the course of the weekend, from Black Friday through to Cyber Monday – with plenty of opportunity to secure a must-have item for less,” Paul Lewis, senior director of marketing at VoucherCodes. “We’ve worked closely with our 5,000 partners to make sure they’re maximising the opportunities presented by the shopping weekend, with hundreds of thousands of offers due to go live from a range of well-known retailers on our site and app.”