A Successful Cyber Week 2018 for Fit Analytics Sizing Partners

With the annual Cyber Week trading peak safely behind us, it’s time for our traditional post-Black Friday breakdown of how we helped the world’s best fashion companies solve sizing during the busiest part of the retail year.

Even by the busy standards of last year, 2018 has been something special – Black Friday page views for Fit Finder have more than doubled to 543M+.

Before we get down to brass tacks, however, let’s start with a quick overview of market expectations heading into the 2018 holiday season kickoff.

Consumer Sentiment Remains Strong Despite Wider Industry Unease

Despite ongoing worries about tariffs, trade agreements, and the state of offline retail, the pre-Black Friday industry consensus was that retail sales would continue to grow (and that’s largely proven to have been the case).

Amidst general relief at another strong Cyber Week worldwide, industry insiders are, however, casting a somewhat wary eye at 2019 as concerns grow around the possibility of a looming economic downturn within the next 12 months.

While the ongoing rise of digital sales is likely to somewhat cushion that possible blow, there’s no doubt that margin pressure will increase sooner rather than later for brands and retailers worldwide. Offering a best-in-class sizing experience is likely to become ever more crucial as the battle for consumers heats up heading into next year.

With all that that in mind, let’s now turn our attention slightly closer to home.

Cyber Week 2018: Fit Analytics Continues to Solve Sizing at Scale

As per usual, the weeks leading up to Black Friday were a hectic time as we prepped our platform and worked closely with sizing partners worldwide to ensure a bulletproof kickoff to the busiest part of the trading year.

All that hard work was not in vain once crunch time actually arrived. Cyber Week 2018 saw a huge uptick in key metrics as consumers across the world swooped on compelling promotions from our sizing partners.

Here are some of the significant year-on-year highlights:

• Page views: Black Friday numbers more than doubled from 227M in 2017 to 543M in 2018
• Sizing recommendations: More than tripled from 44M recommendations in 2017 to 160M+ in 2018
• Countries served: Our sizing platform continued to expand its global reach with 95 countries served compared to 71 in 2017
• Resulting sales: Solving sizing drives real revenue – the number of purchased items supported by Fit Analytics increased by a factor of more than six compared to 2017

Add in API support for ASOS’ recent global rollout of Fit Assistant just in time for Black Friday and it’s been a truly remarkable couple of weeks!

Black Friday Keeps the Consumer Crown

As predicted here previously on the blog, “Christmas creep” is a growing worldwide phenomenon where retailers start promotions ever earlier and spread them out more evenly across the holiday season. Despite that trend, however, Black Friday remains the boss of the big days.

Our own figures showed Black Friday page views more than doubling from 225 million in 2017 to 543 million+ in 2018. Naturally, that’s partly due to continued expansion of our network of sizing partners during that time, but the sheer scale of Black Friday traffic continues to be substantially ahead of second-placed Cyber Monday.

We look forward to helping support our global network of sizing partners throughout what promises to be a very prosperous holiday season and an exciting New Year. If you’re looking to get ahead of the curve for next year’s peak trading periods, talk to us today about getting Fit Finder set up on your site.

With exciting product features such as Product Suggestions and Fit Search rolling off the production line, there’s never been a better time to start solving sizing and selling smarter!