Why Black Friday is a retention event
Black Friday brings you more new customers than any other day of the year. Very few of them come back.
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Seven insights from three Black Fridays and close to 1.9 million Black Week orders in 2025 alone, across the webshops running Hello Retail in the Nordics and Benelux.
Here is some of what you will take away:
- Why the customers Black Friday hands you disappear before the next one, and what that leaves on the table
- The two very different shoppers inside your Black Week traffic, and why one plan cannot serve both
- What "coming back" actually looks like in apparel, health and beauty, and home and garden
Insight 01
Only 4% of a store's Black Friday customers also bought there last Black Friday
We took stores that ran Black Friday in both 2024 and 2025 and matched their buyers. Across all stores, about nine in ten of last year's buyers were simply gone.
The discount buys a transaction, not a customer.
Insight 02
68% of Black Friday buyers had not bought from the same store in the past year
Counting anyone who bought anything in the previous twelve months as an existing customer, 68% were still completely new, and they brought in 67% of the weekend's revenue.
Black Friday reliably delivers the introduction. It reliably fumbles the relationship.
Five more in the report
- 03Two very different shoppers walk into your store
- 04Returning customers buy baskets. New customers buy items
- 05Mid-market shops grew. Smaller shops fell behind
- 06Black Friday has been Black Week for three years running
- 07Your category decides what "coming back" looks like
Author
Sarah Miguel Cournane
Data Scientist
As part of the Data Science Team at Hello Retail, Sarah focuses on extracting insights from customer data to uncover new opportunities and drive business value.
Based on Hello Retail's internal analysis of Black Friday data, covering a consistent group of ecommerce websites across 2023, 2024, and 2025. All figures are aggregated and anonymized, and no individual store, brand, or customer can be identified from anything in the report.