“The average discount on the best offers in online stores was lower than last year, and the proportion of offers that appeared to be better than they really were increased sharply,” Prisjakt’s manager for Norway, Christoffer Reina, stated, according to news bureau NTB.
Prisjakt is a price and product comparison service.
They had expected better offers due to full inventories and weakened purchasing power among Norwegian consumers.
The proportion of offers that increased in price up to 30 days before Black Friday, and were then reduced on Black Friday, was also significantly higher than last year – 12 percent compared to 7 percent in 2021.
Bad deals
Reina said he was surprised by the numbers. Over half of the products that the comparison service monitors had a higher price on Black Friday than they had earlier this year.
Despite this fact, it seems that Norwegians shopped a lot. The payment service Klarna recorded a sales increase of 18 percent compared to last year. Between a third and a half of all online shopping in the Nordics is processed through Klarna’s service.
“Already in the first hour after midnight on Black Friday, we had more people shopping online than last year. It picked up throughout the day and increased sharply in the last hour before midnight yesterday,” marketing director in Klarna Norway, Thomas Elvestad, said.