Black Friday and Cyber Monday drive surge in cross-border sales
Black Friday continued to break records for payment providers in 2024, with cross-border being a major contributor. This week, ecommerce major Shopify noted that merchants using its platform had accrued total sales worth $11.5bn over Black Friday/Cyber Monday, a rise of 24% over the same period last year, with sales where the merchant was located in a different market to the buyer driving much of this growth.
The company reported that more than 76 million consumers worldwide bought from Shopify brands during the four-day period, while average spend per order rose by 0.4% YoY to $108.56. Calculating against total sales, this would mean that Shopify’s total orders rose by around 23% to almost 106 million orders during the period.
The share of Shopify orders that were cross-border rose to 16% (up from 15% last year), making the number of cross-border orders across the four days just under 17 million overall – a rise of around 31% compared to last year. This is a faster growth rate than for total orders in 2024 and significantly faster than the YoY growth rate in cross-border orders Shopify saw during the same period last year (17%). Top countries in terms of merchant locations were the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and Germany.
Meanwhile, payment processor Stripe, which serves Shopify and other ecommerce brands, reported that cross-border transaction volume reached a record $3.2bn over the four-day period – the first time it has released this metric. This accounts for around 10% of its total transaction volumes during the weekend, which it said reached more than $31bn – up by around 67% compared to 2023. In total, Stripe saw transactions rise by around 55% to 465 million over the period, with 43 million transactions (or 9% of the total) being cross-border.
More widely, Adobe Analytics reported that US consumer spending surpassed more than $10.8bn on Black Friday alone, a 10% rise compared to last year, while British shoppers saw a 5.2% rise in online spending over the entire Black Friday/Cyber Monday period to £3.6bn ($4.6bn). Ecommerce spending appears to be winning out over in-store spending in the US, with Mastercard reporting that online US retail sales on Black Friday rose 14.6%, compared to a mere 0.7% growth for in-store sales.
Concerns about the impact of inflation on consumer spending continue to be silenced by consistent strength during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which some companies now seem to be treating like a global sports event. Stripe developed a giant analogue machine reminiscent of early Bond dubbed the ‘Business Flow Control Monitor’ to track its real-time payment flows, with data also available on a website with a mock retro interface. Meanwhile, Shopify projected its own live data across the surface of the enormous Sphere venue in Las Vegas.
How can I compare pricing across cross-border ecommerce providers?
