Record breaking 'Black Friday' for Amazon

The largest online retailer in Britain, Amazon, said that record breaking sales on "Black Friday" were the highest in its 15 year history.

The announcement came less than 48 hours ahead of "Cyber Monday" which is predicted to be the busiest day of the year for online shopping.

Sales on Friday November 29, known as "Black Friday", reached four million items.

This beat the previous record of last year's "Cyber Monday", when Amazon.co.uk saw more than three and a half million items ordered on site, at a rate of around 41 items per second.

That meant that a delivery lorry packed with Cyber Monday orders left one of Amazon’s eight UK fulfillment centres every two minutes and 10 seconds.

Black Friday was traditionally a post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy in the US, but it is becoming established in the UK after Seattle-based Amazon started offering deals in 2010.

The top selling items on "Cyber Monday" are predicted to be the Kindle electronic reader, the Star Trek into Darkness film, and the Grand Theft Auto V video game.

Amazon has hired 15,000 temporary staff and 2,300 extra permanent employees to deal with the Christmas rush. The company has eight warehouses across the UK, including Hemel Hempstead, to
deliver orders to customers.

To coincide with the online spending spree, The Telegraph visited Amazon's newest UK warehouse in Hemel Hempstead to see how the retailer will cope with the surge in customer orders on "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday".

The company's work practices were heavily criticised in a BBC Panorama documentary, with staff claiming they have to walk 11 miles in a shift and collect orders every 33 seconds.

However, Catherine McDermott, the UK operations director, defended Amazon as an employer.

"It is really important to me that people come to Amazon and have a positive experience," she said. "We want people to come back."

The 465,000 sq ft Hemel Hempstead fulfilment centre includes tens of thousands of products, ranging from the Playstation Four to nappies.

Products are literally scattered across the centre, because Amazon believes the most efficient method of picking orders is for products to be organised randomly.

"This maximises the chances of the items you [the Amazon employee] are picking being near to each other," Ms McDermott explains.

The most popular items are stocked in more than one place in the giant fulfilment centre, which feels more like a car production line than a retail warehouse.

This strategy has been honed by Amazon over 15 years of retailing in the UK.

"The attention to detail and the obsession with the customer is exceptional," Ms McDermott adds. "This is what best practice at Amazon looks like at the moment."

Although employees pick customer orders from the shelves to place in "totes" and then wrap the item in Amazon's distinctive brown packaging, much of the fulfilment centre is automated. For example, customer addresses are stamped on the packaging by a machine that automatically reads the barcode, while products are carried from one part of the centre to another by a conveyor belt.

This year, Amazon is doubling its Black Friday promotions to offer 2,000 "Lightning Deals", which heavily discounts a limited quantity of a product for a limited period of time.

Asda and John Lewis have also got in the act this year, with Asda's superstores decked out with the logos of its US parent company Walmart. It will offer the Cyclone Explorer 7 inch-tablet computer priced as low as £49 in a first-come-first-served offer.

Source : John Ficenec - The Telegraph
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/10485833/Amazon-reports-record-breaking-Black-Friday.html