Black Friday lands next week, and the thing I keep coming back to as it approaches is how much of the traffic is going to arrive on a phone. Black Friday is not really a British tradition, but it has been creeping into our retail calendar for a couple of years now, pushed along by the big US-owned retailers, and the volume it drives keeps growing.
What is different this year is mobile. For a while now phones have driven a lot of browsing but far fewer actual purchases. People looked on the phone and bought on the desktop later. That gap has been closing all year, and over a peak weekend like this one I expect a real share of retailers to see more than half their visits come from mobile, with a meaningful chunk of the buying happening there too rather than being deferred.
That matters because Black Friday is exactly the moment your site gets tested by people with no patience. They are hunting for a deal, they have twenty tabs open, and if your mobile checkout fumbles they are gone to a competitor before you have finished apologising. There is no goodwill on a discount weekend.
If you sell online, the checklist for the next few days is not glamorous:
- Load speed on mobile, on a real connection. Peak traffic and a heavy site are a bad combination. Every second of delay on a small screen is someone reconsidering.
- The checkout, on a phone, with your thumb. Walk it yourself. Every field, every button, guest checkout included. If it is annoying to you it is fatal to a stranger in a hurry.
- Payment options that suit a phone. Anything that saves a shopper typing card details on a small keyboard removes a real point of drop-off.
- Server capacity. Make sure whatever hosts your site can take a spike, because the worst possible day for it to fall over is the one day everyone is trying to spend money.
- Email ready to go. Your list is the cheapest way to tell people the deals are live. Have it built, tested on a phone, and scheduled.
The wider point is that this weekend tends to expose whatever you have been putting off on mobile. The businesses that treated a decent mobile experience as a nice-to-have all year get their bill on the busiest day. The ones that took it seriously mostly get to enjoy the traffic.
I will be watching my own numbers over the weekend to see where the mobile share actually lands. My hunch is that this is the year it stops being a trend people talk about and becomes just how the day works.
