How Patchworks helped boost client orders by a third this Black November

Ecommerce has come a long way in just 10 years. In fact, in 2012, ecommerce made up just 8% of total retail sales - whereas in 2021 that number had risen to nearly 20%.

Black Friday has been a major influencer on the success of ecommerce. A decades-old retail tradition, the Black Friday weekend lent itself perfectly for online. No more lengthy queues for the chance to grab a reduced item. Now, customers can just log on and get all their eye-watering discounts from the comfort of their own home.

But now, we’re starting to see a change in shopping behaviours. People aren’t just spending money during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend. They’re spreading things out across the whole of November - what we like to call Black November.

And as an ecommerce specialist integrations provider, we’ve since this first hand over the last month.

A huge increase in customer orders

During Black November this year, many of our clients have had their most successful Black Friday on record.

In fact, the total orders we’ve processed through our integration platform rose by 31% compared to November last year. That’s thanks to our diligent focus on our new no-code/low-code platform, which has helped us empower our clients to take control of their own integrations.

And total transactions - when any entity is pulled through our system, from refunds to stock levels - have increased by 8.6 to 24.2 million.

One of our clients, Passenger, saw some major achievements during the BFCM period. For their Green Friday event, they pledged to plant five trees per order for seven days.

This was a roaring success. We helped them process nearly 20,000 orders in this short period, which will enable them to plant 90,105 trees and protect over 18 million square metres of rainforest.

And outside of their Green Friday event, they saw a 145% increase in sales year-on-year.

We trampled past our average monthly orders…

The holiday period is always a busy one for ecommerce companies. And whilst the BFCM weekend makes up a huge amount of sales in November, it’s still a popular month for people to get their Christmas shopping over and done with.

In fact, for Patchworks, November has been our busiest month this year.

We’ve seen a total of 6.8 million orders go through our system during Black November 2022. That’s a 188% increase compared to our average month in a year.

… But Black Friday was a big help

Black Friday topped records this year by reaching online sales of $9 billion. It looks like even with brick and mortar stores back in business following COVID, ecommerce is here to stay.

We’ve seen a piece of that success, too. We processed over 1.7 million orders this BFCM, which is a rate of around 292 per minute.

And we couldn’t have done it without the incredible work of our team, and the support of our partners. Every year we implement a BFCM code freeze so that our platform doesn’t go through any unnecessary updates during the busiest time of the year.

That ensures customers can keep doing what they’re doing, without any glitches.

Celebrating the end to a successful year

We’ve talked a lot about our BFCM achievements. But Patchworks has had an amazing year overall.

With the launch of our new platform, we’re positioned better than ever to serve our clients and get their integrations up and running quickly and seamlessly.

Whether that’s during a typical day of the year, or over peak periods like BFCM.

We’ve also been empowering companies with our stock control solution, Stockr, which allows businesses to create a unified stock pool to draw from and avoid overselling.

For more information on any of our products, get in touch today. We’ll give you a free consultation and demo of our integration capabilities and additional software.