Flight tickets, subscriptions, electronic devices, as well as medications and Botox treatments are also discounted. More and more stores are participating in the Black Friday shopping day and it is spreading over more and more days.
As we approach Friday, much more shopping is done online than usual. In the last two days, almost 9 million purchases were made through the iDeal payment platform, that is, one and a half million more than usual.
Retail chains are trying to attract customers earlier, launching their offers days or weeks before Black Friday. “Black Friday is no longer a day or a week, but a week and a half or two,” says Eric van Ballegoie of tech site Tweakers.
It keeps track of all electronics offers in stores these weeks. “Shop owners are driving each other crazy, hoping that you, the consumer, will not wait too long and spend the euro with them and not with someone else.”
Pushing and pulling work
For more than a decade, chains in the Netherlands have been offering deals around Black Friday at the end of November. This phenomenon originates from America, where the Christmas shopping season traditionally begins the day after Thanksgiving. There, chains lower prices so consumers compete to get the best discounts.
There are no such scenes, especially in the Netherlands, where stores have been reducing prices for days. iDeal’s figures show that a lot of shopping is happening. On Monday, 4.65 million purchases were made on the platform, and on Tuesday, the figure was 4.1 million. On a normal day, there are about 3.6 million people. It is not known how much money was spent.
The payment platform expects a new transaction record during Black Friday.
fake offers
The Dutch Consumers and Markets Authority has found that there are a number of shops offering fake offers on their websites. The regulator wants to take action against this situation, but as far as we know, no penalties have been imposed yet.
“There are plenty of stores that claim to offer discounts of all kinds, but that’s not the case,” says Tweakers editor Eric Van Ballegoie. “We are tracking price drops and there are certainly products that have dropped significantly in price in these weeks. But by the end of last week we had already seen most of the good offers online.”
Source: NOS
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
