Black Friday 2024: The Numbers Are In

Black Friday is the event the UK retail industry simultaneously dreads and depends on. It arrived from the US in the early 2010s looking slightly baffling (a post-Thanksgiving shopping tradition in a country that doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving) and has since become firmly embedded in the retail calendar, despite periodic predictions that consumers would tire of it, that the promotional logic was destructive to margin, or that the whole thing would dissolve into a prolonged Cyber Monday.

The 2024 data suggests it remains robust. Adobe Analytics tracked £1.12 billion in UK online spend on Black Friday 2024, up 7.2% year-on-year — the strongest Black Friday performance since 2021. The figure is significant because it comes after a period of softer consumer spending in the UK, driven by cost-of-living pressures and elevated mortgage rates, that had led to some expectation of a weaker year. Adobe's Digital Insights team tracked hundreds of millions of visits to UK retail sites and monitored 100 million SKUs across 18 product categories; this is not a sample, it's the most comprehensive view available of UK ecommerce on its busiest day.

The Mobile Story

£623.9 million of that spend came through mobile devices, representing 55.9% of total online spend and up 9.8% on the previous year. Mobile growth outpaced overall growth on the day: while total online spending rose 7.2%, mobile rose 9.8%. The gap is not coincidental.

Black Friday has become a mobile-first, notification-driven shopping moment. Consumers check for deals on their phones, often in the morning before work. Retailers whose checkout is fast and integrated with Apple Pay or Google Pay are capturing a disproportionate share of impulse conversions. The ones whose mobile experience is a ported desktop journey are probably losing more than they realise. The mobile-majority tipping point in UK ecommerce isn't news in 2024, but the Black Friday concentration is more pronounced than the annual average, and that concentration is growing year on year.

BNPL: £117 Million in a Day

Buy Now Pay Later services accounted for £117.2 million of Black Friday spending, roughly 10.5% of total UK online spend on the day, up 15.6% on Black Friday 2023. BNPL grew twice as fast as overall spending. That gap matters: it tells you something about where consumer credit appetite sits in the current moment, and it tells you something about average order values in the categories that drove the day.

The BNPL figure is a proxy for several things at once: consumer credit appetite, AOV in discretionary categories, and the degree to which "spread the cost" is now a standard checkout expectation rather than a specialist offering. The Klarna UK banking licence development from 2024 is relevant context here. BNPL providers are building toward a more integrated financial services position, not just a checkout feature. The Black Friday data is one more data point confirming that consumers are moving with them.

The AI Dimension: Early but Present

There's a temptation, writing this shortly after the event, to read an AI commerce story into the 2024 Black Friday data. The honest answer is that Adobe's UK data doesn't include AI-referred traffic figures for this period. What we know from the broader direction of travel is that AI assistants were being used as gift-research and deal-comparison tools by a growing segment of consumers through the 2024 holiday season, but from a small enough base that it wasn't a headline figure.

The story that becomes significant in the 2025 holiday season data is directionally visible in 2024 if you're paying attention: consumers who do use AI assistants for shopping research are self-selecting high-intent, which is why AI-referred traffic converts at rates well above the channel average. In 2024, it's a small signal. By 2025, it's the story. The retailers who started thinking about AI product content optimisation in 2024 got the head start.

What the Numbers Say

The categories that drove the day were predictable and slightly odd in equal measure: sterling silver jewellery, trainers, smart TVs, PlayStation 5 Slim Console, perfumes and fragrances, laptops, and LEGO sets alongside board games and Tonies Audio Play Figurines. Electronics and accessories dominate in volume. The fashion and gifting mix tells a separate story, one that surfaces in the returns data in January.

Discounting averaged 13.4% across categories, with the deepest cuts in Computers (19.8%), Toys (18%), and Apparel (17.4%). Those aren't token discounts. They're the kind of numbers that make consumers plan their purchases around the event rather than treating it as a coincidence of deals.

What I keep coming back to is the 7.2% growth figure. In a year when consumer confidence was subdued and the cost of living was a genuine constraint for millions of UK households, 7.2% real growth in online spending on the single biggest retail day of the year is not a sign of an industry in difficulty. It's a sign of an industry that knows how to move product when it commits to doing so.