Payfast’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) online tracker is now live, revealing how much South Africans are spending on this year’s sales.
Payfast is an online payment gateway that facilitates ecommerce payments. It currently serves more than 80,000 merchants, ranging from small businesses to large enterprises.
The company first launched its BFCM dashboard in 2020.
“The dashboard makes live payment data available to the general public during the biggest retail event of the year, in real-time,” Payfast explained.
The dashboard shows the value of the top individual transactions, the cities in which South Africans are making Black Friday purchases, the top payment methods, and transaction statistics per province.
Individual transactions are tracked in real-time, while Payfast also keeps tabs on whether shoppers use mobile or desktop devices to make their purchases.
At the time of publication, the highest amount spent by a single online shopper using one of the payment facilities tracked by PayFast was R101,725, while the average basket value came in at R1,256.
The most transactions by a single online shopper were 15, with a total value of R6,650.
Visa cards were the most popular payment method, followed by Instant EFTs and Masterpass. Mobile devices accounted for 75% of sales.
The images below show some of the Black Friday transaction details available at the time of publication.
Numerous major South African retailers and online stores are offering Black Friday deals this month.
In previous years, online shoppers have struggled with website outages, payment problems, and delayed deliveries due to a significant increase in transactions.
Game, Makro, Takealot, Loot, OneDayOnly, and Wootware have told MyBroadband they were well prepared for this year’s influx of orders and would do their best to ensure deliveries arrived on time.
Makro parent company Massmart said that several measures would ensure a much smoother order fulfilment process this year.
These include improved last-mile delivery capability with better integration with third-party delivery vendors and investment in its own capacity, more efficient in-store picking processes, and increased call centre resources.
Online stores like OneDayOnly and Loot have worked with their partners and suppliers to increase stock and the number of pick-ups by their delivery teams.
However, PC hardware store Wootware has warned that online stores might experience delivery delays as couriers struggle to keep up with demand.
Main Image: BBC