CAPE TOWN – BankservAfrica continued to crunch the figures on Black Friday sales and on Wednesday revealed that South Africans spent a total of R2 897 897 379 for 2018, a 15.92 percent growth when compared with 2017’s R2 499 876 432.
BankservAfrica, Africa’s largest automated payments clearing house, also revealed that debit and credit card transactions reached 4.8 million during this year’s Black Friday, which represents a 4 percent year-on-year growth on 2017’s 4.7 million.
BankservAfrica’s figures, which covers all in-store card transactions (excluding ATM) by BankservAfrica between midnight and 11:59pm on November 23, showed the highest transaction per second took place at 4:38pm where 153 transactions were processed.
The second highest was at 12:34pm where there were 152.
The busiest card swiping hours were between 4pm and 5pm where there were 404 194 purchases.
Executive head: payments business at BankservAfrica, Martin Grunewald, said: “Although the total volume of card purchases for Black Friday is greater than online shopping, the year-on-year growth for online shopping shows more South Africans are moving online make their purchases.”
Last week, BankservAfrica revealed that this year, 7.7 percent of all card transactions took place online on Black Friday and Cyber Monday online. This represented a 55 percent growth on 2017’s 260 552. For Cyber Monday, the total amount was 176 595, a 36 percent growth on 2017’s 129 458.
“This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday figures surpassed 2017’s with more South Africans taking to online to do their transactions,” said Grunewald. “The year-on-year growth certainly reflects the growing popularity of these major shopping days despite the tougher economy experienced.”
Black Friday proved to be more popular among South Africans with 404 594 online transactions, a 55 percent growth from 260 552 in 2017, while for Cyber Monday this was 176 595, a 36 percent growth from 129 458 in 2017.
The most expensive transaction for Black Friday was more than R6 million while for Cyber Monday this reached R5 million.