Consumers flocked to UK stores during Black Friday on 28 November 2014 for the biggest shopping day ever on the British high street. Barclaycard reports that this year's Black Friday was the highest spending day on record, with online sales up 37.5% compared to last year. Amazon UK, John Lewis and Worldpay also recorded a significant increase in sales over the Black Friday weekend.
Oxford Street was exceptionally busy during both Black Friday and Cyber Monday with consumers looking for bargains during this pre Christmas sales event. There was barely space to move on the streets with customers queuing at all major stores. Even Apple, which did not discount its goods during Black Friday, had an extremely long queue on Black Friday.
Online sales did not fare much better as we noticed the websites for a number of major stores such as Tesco, Argos, Currys and John Lewis were all down due to the huge volume of activity on their sites. It is worth noting that the Amazon website did not appear to suffer any downtime as it continued to operate seamlessly despite the huge increase in traffic. Amazon host their own cloud servers and were clearly equipped to deal with the surge in activity over the Black Friday weekend.
Black Friday was the busiest day on record for online retailer Amazon UK, with sales that "surpassed all expectations". The company said its website recorded orders for more than 5.5 million goods.