Mollie, one of the fastest-growing payment service providers, has revealed insights into the most popular payment methods used this Black Friday. The data, which provides a year-on-year comparison of 2019, shows that payment methods allowing customers to pay flexibly – like ‘pay later’ service Klarna – has more than doubled in 2020. The study spans 101,000 merchants across Europe, primarily from Germany, U.K., France, the Netherlands and Belgium.
This years Black Friday trends include:
- In 2019, Mollie saw a 36% increase in the overall number of transactions on Black Friday versus the previous year. In 2020, this shot up to a growth of 56% on the 2019 numbers, representing a difference of 20%.
- And this year, even in the four days leading up to Black Friday, there was a 58% YoY growth in transactions.
- Use of ‘buy now, pay later’ services on Black Friday (such as Klarna or ClearPay) has more than doubled from 1% of all payments in 2019 to almost 2.5% in 2020.
- Use of mobile payment methods on Black Friday is consistent on the previous year – 0.20% in 2019 to 0.25% in 2020.
“There is a lot of pressure on consumers’ wallets at the moment, which is making people look to payment methods that offer them financial security,” said Ken Serdons, Chief Commercial Officer at Mollie. “It makes sense that fintechs like Klarna, who have performed phenomenally well this year, have been so popular this Black Friday. The increase is in-line with this growing trend towards more flexibility in how consumers pay for goods.”
Despite Mollies increase in the number of transactions this year, Barclaycard Payments, which processes nearly £1 in every £3 spent in the UK, has so far seen a -16.7% decrease in the volume of payments compared to the same period on Black Friday last year.
Rob Cameron, CEO of Barclaycard Payments, said: “We’re now able to look at a full day’s worth of Black Friday sales, and as expected the number of transactions is down compared to last year. It’s important to note that transactions are still up considerably compared to the rest of lockdown, but the real focus now will be on Wednesday 2nd December – the end of the national lockdown in England – when we predict that shoppers heading back to the high street will bring about a ‘Black Wednesday’, with transactions likely surpassing what we’ve seen today.
“In what has been a difficult year for UK Retail, I would like to congratulate businesses for the resilience and determination they have shown. Thanks to the lessons learned in the first lockdown, we have never had more businesses set up to take payments online, offsetting much of the drop in in-store sales over the past month. In fact, if businesses hadn’t taken those lessons on board and embraced e-commerce to the same degree, we believe that the overall drop in transactions could have been up to twice as large.”
