Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Despite some of that economic uncertainty Spencer was talking about, disappointment over the size of discounts, U.S. shoppers did open their wallets on Black Friday. So what does that mean for the month ahead? Harley Finkelstein, president of global commerce company Shopify, is here with some good data, some good insights. I mean, where we ended it there with Spencer Harley, the forecasters...
The predictors say that this will be another record shopping season in aggregate. The data available to you, what are you seeing? What are the trends?
Yeah, I heard what Spencer said there. I mean, look, Friday was another record-breaking Black Friday weekend. We saw about $6.2 billion in sales for Black Friday. That's up about 25% from last year. We saw peak sales of $5.1 million per minute on Friday. That happened around noon on Friday. That's up from $4.6 million last year as well.
And if you pull up, actually, anyone can see this BFCM.shop. You can actually see global commerce happening right now in real time. We are currently seeing about $2.5 million in sales per minute, about 25,000 orders per minute. And we've seen just shy of 70 million unique shoppers buy from Shopify stores. So it's certainly shaping up to be another great day.
And happy to go into some of the merchants and some of the trends that we're seeing across Shopify.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Harley Finkelstein provide on Black Friday sales trends?
US versus Europe. Could we start there?
Yeah.
Yeah, sure. I mean, look, if you look at top-selling countries across the world where Shopify sells, we have millions of stores. In places like the U.S., we power 12% of all e-commerce. So we have a really great view of things. U.S., U.K., Australia, Germany, and Canada are the top five. Look at top three selling cities. You see L.A., New York, and London. In U.S.
alone, L.A., New York, and San Francisco are the top three. The other thing that we also saw is cross-border, but 17% of orders were cross-border orders, so shipped to a different country as well. And then in terms of top-trending merchants that we saw, we saw Hatch, which is sort of this, they have something called the Restore 3, which is this phone-free alarm for kind of morning routines.
Crunch Labs has this sort of kids' build-it-yourself monthly toy subscription.
brook linen in on their super plush robe and then base has their weekender travel bag as well so we're seeing across a bunch of different verticals do really well but a big thing actually that we're seeing now is last year seemed to be a lot a lot of talk about getting outside gifts were about the products being sold were about you know things like skiing or hiking or camping this year seems to be that home is really you know the winner here where people are buying things for their
home, whether it's kitchen stuff for the kitchen or puzzles or blankets. But generally, consumers are buying from brands they love. And we're fortunate those brands are on Shopify.
What does that cross-border stat, that 17% signal to you? Is that growing? I mean, how does that stand up to last year when perhaps tariffs weren't such a headwind?
Yeah, I mean, what I think it means is that consumers generally are somewhat geographically agnostic. They want to buy from their favorite brands. You know, we heard from Gymshark. They had their biggest Black Friday sale ever online. AG1, Athletic Greens, was up 50%. Brunt Workwear got an order every five seconds.
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