Two weeks have passed since Black Friday and my inbox has only just calmed down. As every year, the big retailers announced records, the press counted orders per minute, and Facebook filled up with screenshots of “slashed prices” that, on closer inspection, were not slashed at all. I have lived through several Black Fridays from both sides of the counter: as an online retailer with Floria (my online flower shop), and through Retargeting (the marketing automation platform I co-founded), alongside the stores that use our platform. So I have an opinion. Several, actually.
In short: Black Friday is the best thing that has happened to Romanian e-commerce and, at the same time, one of the best opportunities to ruin your reputation. It all depends on how you play it.
How an American day became Romania’s national shopping event
In the US, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, at the end of November. We do not have Thanksgiving in Romania, so we kept only the discounts and moved them wherever suited us: a Friday in November, usually mid-month, a week or two ahead of the Americans. The first to push the idea seriously was eMAG (Romania’s largest online retailer), around 2011, and by 2012 half of the Romanian internet was talking about it. That was also when we saw the first sites collapsing under traffic, virtual queues and jokes about the name (quite a few people thought “Black Friday” sounded like a day of mourning).
Since 2013 it has become a national event. Brick-and-mortar shops joined in, along with electronics, fashion and furniture retailers, even travel agencies. In 2016 almost everyone selling anything online had a “Black Friday offer”, and some stretched it over a whole week or even a month. When the whole month is Black Friday, no day really is.
Real discounts or inflated “before” prices?
This is the part that annoys me. There are genuine Black Friday discounts, some of them very good, especially on old stock or from brands clearing space for new collections. But there is also the Romanian version of the magic trick: the “before” price quietly goes up two or three weeks earlier, and on the big day it drops back to its normal level, now wearing a red -40% label.
Shoppers are no longer naive. There are browser extensions and websites that track price history, people take screenshots and post them, and one fake discount exposed does more damage in a few hours than a month of good advertising can fix. The National Authority for Consumer Protection (ANPC, Romania’s consumer watchdog) again announced inspections this year and received complaints about unclear reference prices, products that sold out the moment an offer went live, and orders cancelled unilaterally. The law is fairly clear: the reference price must be the one actually charged before, not one invented for the occasion.
When the server goes down and the courier stops answering
The second big source of complaints is technical and logistical. Sites that will not load at the exact launch hour, carts that empty themselves, payments that go through twice or not at all. Then, once the order has shipped, comes the silence: couriers receive several weeks’ worth of parcels in a single day, and packages that should arrive within 24 hours take a week.
The customer does not distinguish between you and the courier. For them, the store was late. They do not care that you had ten times your usual traffic; they just wanted the TV they were promised by the weekend. If you do not warn them, do not pick up the phone and do not tell them honestly what is going on, you have lost them, even if the product eventually arrives.
What Black Friday does to margins and loyalty
Let’s talk about money openly. A small store does not have a giant’s negotiating power. If you sell 30-40% below your usual price, with typical Romanian e-commerce margins, most of the time you earn nothing, or even lose money, especially once you add advertising, free shipping and returns. High volume feels like success, but December’s accounts may tell a different story.
There is a subtler effect too: you train your customers to wait. If a customer learns that buying from you only makes sense in November, they will keep their wallet closed the rest of the year. And people attracted purely by price are usually the least loyal. They come for the discount and leave for the next discount, somewhere else.
That does not make Black Friday a bad idea. It means you should treat it as an investment in customer acquisition, not as a day of profit. The right question is not “how much did we sell on Friday” but “how many of the new customers will buy again before summer”.
How a small store should play it
Say you run an online store selling home accessories, with a few hundred products and a small team. You cannot match the big retailers’ discounts and you should not try. What you can do is be better prepared and more honest than they are. This is the list I would draw up around early October:
- Stock. Pick a few products with genuine discounts and make sure you physically have them. Nothing irritates people more than “out of stock” five minutes after launch.
- Servers. Talk to your hosting provider early, load-test the site and prepare a decent holding page in case it goes down anyway.
- Couriers. Negotiate extra capacity, share your estimated volumes and show realistic delivery times on the site, not your usual ones.
- Honest offers. The reference price should be the real one from recent weeks. A genuine 15% discount beats an invented 50% every time.
- Communication. Clear confirmation emails, a phone number someone actually answers, and proactive messages when an order is delayed.
- The team. All hands on deck that week, including for returns and complaints, not just for sales.
The real game starts after Black Friday
This is the part almost everyone ignores. You paid a lot to bring thousands of new people to your site. You have their email addresses, their order history, the products they looked at. And what do you do with all that? Usually nothing, until the next campaign.
From what we see at Retargeting, the real money from Black Friday is made in the months that follow: a personalised thank-you email, a recommendation for a complementary product, a Christmas message to those who bought in November, a reminder about the cart abandoned on the night of peak traffic. A customer who had a good experience and then receives a relevant message, not spam, has every reason to come back. At full price.
Festival or illusion?
Honestly, both. For shoppers, Black Friday can be a real opportunity if they do their homework and compare prices. For the big retailers, it is a show of strength and an image campaign. For small stores, it is a test of logistics, honesty and patience. Those who treat it as a one-day lottery will be complaining about margins again next year. Those who treat it as the start of a relationship with new customers will look forward to it.
How did you experience Black Friday this year, as a seller or as a shopper? Did you catch a genuine bargain, or just red labels?