They say a last impression can often be a lasting impression. If that’s the case, the Black Friday promotional period left quite the impression on the independent retail channel as we get set to close the books on 2024. Despite the rocky road the channel – and specifically the home appliance dealer – has traveled this year, performance drastically improved during the final weeks of the year, according to Nationwide Marketing Group’s latest promotional holiday report, powered by the group’s proprietary PriMetrix platform.
If you’ve been following NMG’s promotional period reports, you’ve seen the momentum building in the home appliance retail segment. Independent retailers have been comping favorably, year-over-year, since the July 4th promo event, leading up to the Black Friday period, which ran from November 6 through December 4.
During that event, home appliance sales in the channel were up 20.8 percent in total volume and over 19 percent in number of units sold compared to last year. The period was also the highest grossing for home appliance dealers this year, up roughly 25 percent over the next closest holiday event in 2024, which was Labor Day. Zooming in on just the Black Friday holiday weekend, the numbers get even better. Volume over that five-day period was up 27.7 percent while units sold increased 25.5 percent.
From a product perspective, all four of the major categories were up significantly throughout the Black Friday period. For the full promotional period, all categories were up at least 18 percent in total dollars and at least 15 percent in total units sold compared to last year. And, again, looking more closely at the actual Black Friday holiday weekend, all four categories out-performed 2023 by at least 25 percent in dollars and 23 percent in units sold. There was almost no movement, year-over-year, in terms of market share by product. Refrigerators continued to hold the largest market share at around 36 percent, followed by cooking (32 percent), laundry (21 percent) and dishwashers (11 percent).
It would be hard to sell that type of performance short, but to add just a little bit of context – 2023 was very much a soft year for the home appliance category, which is news to no one. Despite being a very promotionally driven year last year, 2023 Black Friday performance was down in the high-single-digits compared to 2022. So, a soft year combined with strong performance at retail this year and the 2024 numbers are looking even better.
E-commerce performance also improved greatly throughout the Black Friday period. Data from a cross section of retailers on NMG’s OneShop platform showed that the average number of e-commerce orders placed was up 88 percent, year-over-year, while e-commerce revenue was up over 130 percent. Additionally, the average e-commerce ticket across the OneShop platform rose 22 percent this year. The best performing website saw orders go up 254 percent and revenue increase 305 percent, while the average ticket on that site was up 83 percent.
Vendor support played an incredibly important part in the performance of the group’s OneShop websites throughout the Black Friday period. Vendor-backed campaigns that ran during the holiday helped drive nearly 74 million impressions across NMG retailers’ websites. That resulted in an average cost per click of around $0.40 – compared to an industry average of $2.11 – and a click-through-rate of 0.94 percent – versus an industry average of 0.61 percent.
Want more insights like this? NMG Members enrolled in the PriMetrix platform can view the full report here. Want to get started with PriMetrix? Click here to learn more and sign up.
