2020 has been one for the records – ecommerce has boomed over the past few months as a result of COVID-19 lockdown and, unsurprisingly, Black Friday / Cyber Monday (BFCM) has broken all previous PayFast records. Due to social distancing being accepted as the new normal, shoppers were eager this year to capitalise on online deals during BFCM from the safety of their own homes.
In the lead up to BFCM, we extended our Customer Services operational hours to ensure that the team had more capacity to answer merchant and buyer tickets. Our team of developers also worked hard to ensure PayFast could handle the increased load on our payments engine. Despite experiencing a few hours of degraded performance on the morning of Black Friday, we’re happy to report that we processed a record number of transactions.
Black Friday 2020 outperforms 2019
On Black Friday, PayFast processed a 283% increase in total payment volumes compared to a normal busy day, such as a typical 2020 payday. We also recorded a year-on-year increase of 25% in total payment volumes, and 37% year-on-year increase in the number of transactions processed on Black Friday.
On average, online shoppers spent more per basket at R1,243.10 compared to a normal average 2020 basket value of R803. Meanwhile, the highest single transaction was a whopping R299,950. It’s also worth noting this year 30.33% of all transactions made on Black Friday were done via Instant EFT, which continues to be our fastest growing online payment method.
Unexpectedly, the majority of online shoppers who paid with PayFast were using their mobile device, which was 66% compared to only 1.24% who used their tablet. Other interesting stats we picked up was that a third of all users who paid via PayFast were aged 25-34, and over half of all of our Black Friday shoppers were based in Gauteng.
We hope you had a profitable BFCM period and that the upcoming festive season meets all of your expectations. To stay up to date with the latest PayFast news and updates, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.
