Australians spent $6 billion in the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales last year and, despite soaring inflation, retailers are banking on another busy trading period from Friday.
"Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become significantly important to the retail industry," Australian Retailers Association (ARA) chief executive, Paul Zahra told The Business.
"In fact about 25 per cent of sales of the whole Christmas shopping [period] will be done in this one week.
"So it's a big event that has US heritage, but it's become a global phenomena and really appropriate for Australian consumers right now."
Black Friday shopping events began as Thanksgiving long weekend sales in the US, and Cyber Monday was later added as the online version.
Now they have merged to a four-day sale-athon, although many retailers start discounting up to a week before Black Friday.
The ARA expects shoppers will spend about $200 million more than the same period last year, taking the total to $6.2 billion worth of retail trade between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Historically high inflation is not expected to sour sales
Even though inflation is the highest it has been in more than 30 years, retail trade numbers show consumers are still shopping more.
The latest data from the Bureau of Statistics showed an increase in spending in September, partly as a result of higher prices.
But sales volumes were also 10 per cent higher in the September 2022 quarter than in the same period of 2021, when millions of households were locked down for months in the south-eastern states.
Data like that is giving retailers, such as online women's fashion store St Frock, confidence this super sales period will be strong.
"Black Friday, and Cyber Monday is the most exciting time of the year for St Frock," founder and chief executive officer Sandradee Makejev told The Business.
"It's where we benchmark ourselves for our best numbers — it makes up 7 per cent of our annual sales."
The company expects to sell 35,000 items, turning over about $2 million.
It is not just fashion where big trading numbers are expected.
"Black Friday is huge, we would expect over 500 per cent increase over our average days, for Black Friday," Ruslan Kogan, the founder and chief executive of Kogan.com, told The Business.
He is confident consumers will be doing a lot of shopping now, in search of a deal.
"We're a value-based retailer, we're all about efficiency and looking to drive costs down for customers, and they start to appreciate it more and more during this current inflationary period where there are a lot of cost-of-living pressures."
Mr Zahra expects all retailers will have sales to lure consumers.
"Every retailer is going out with with big deals and big offers to entice customers to shop," he said.
"While we expect Australian consumers to be impacted by cost-of-living pressures, we haven't seen them stop their spending just yet.
"This is the week to be shopping."
The trading event of the year
Analysis by ANZ reveals Black Friday is now the busiest time for retail in Australia.
But the last two shopping events coincided with the end of COVID-induced lockdowns, where pent up demand saw consumers open their wallets wider than usual.
With inflation now above 7 per cent, ANZ senior economist Adelaide Timbrell told ABC News this weekend of sales will be an indicator of consumer behaviour for the months ahead.
"The strength or weakness on Black Friday will give us some clues as to how quickly households slow down their spending as a result of rate hikes."
Ms Makejev expects the improvement in her trading results for this financial year to be down on the COVID years.
"In our first year of COVID we had 100 per cent growth and the second year 20 per cent growth, but this year, we'll be expecting 5 per cent growth," she said.
"We started to see a slowdown in [the second half] last financial year, from January onwards, which most e-commerce and tech companies are experiencing.
"No one expected the slowdown, but it is great for bricks and mortar retailers, they've been able to reopen and have some of the love back, and I'm more than happy to give it to them, because I had 100 per cent growth in that first year of COVID."
Australia Post will deliver millions of packages
The national delivery service expects this year's Black Friday sales period to be less chaotic than the past two, because pent up demand will not be as strong.
"It's a very different year this year, because you may recall last year we were coming out of lockdown, 15 million Australians in lockdown in the eastern seaboard and everyone was buying online and it was just opening up," Australia Post's executive general manager, customer and commercial, Gary Starr told The Business.
Despite the ability for more face-to-face retail, Mr Starr still expects Australia Post will deliver more packages this year than last.
"This year there are options now to shop in store and we're seeing obviously more of that, so e-commerce volumes have moderated a little bit, but we do expect still very modest growth of about 3 per cent over the same period last year."
Between the Black Friday sales and Christmas Day last year, Australia Post delivered 52 million parcels.
"We start planning for the peak period in sort of April, May every year and of course, we've had two years of a lot of experience now with large volumes," Mr Starr said.
"We're recruiting 6,000 extra team members, we've added a number of processing sites across the country, which gives us an extra 2.5 million parcel processing [capacity] a day, and extra planes, and extra vans and trucks.
"We plan around the volumes we expect to see, and we have the capacity, we believe, to deliver by the dates that we've set out for Christmas."
