Every year, people lose their minds over Black Friday.

If the videos are anything to go on, shopping on Black Friday is a contact sport.

Which is why, if you have access to the internet, it’s probably safer to shop online.

Whether you braved the malls or shopped from the comfort of your desk at work (busted), South Africans shopped hard this past Black Friday, as revealed in a report by BankservAfrica.

According to the report, Black Friday sales amounted to a staggering R2,89 billion for 2018, a 15,92% growth when compared with 2017’s R2,5 billion, reports IOL.

As an aside, stats show that Takealot took home a large percentage of that number.

BankservAfrica, Africa’s largest automated payments clearing house, also revealed that debit and credit card transactions reached 4.8 million during this year’s Black Friday, which represents a 4 percent year-on-year growth on 2017’s 4.7 million.

BankservAfrica’s figures, which covers all in-store card transactions (excluding ATM) by BankservAfrica between midnight and 11:59pm on November 23, showed the highest transaction per second took place at 4:38pm where 153 transactions were processed.

The second highest was at 12:34pm where there were 152.

Executive head of payments business at BankservAfrica, Martin Grunewald, said that although the number of card purchases on Black Friday outweighed online purchases, the increase in online purchases shows that more South Africans are opting for online shopping.

Last week, BankservAfrica revealed that this year, 7.7 percent of all card transactions took place online on Black Friday and Cyber Monday online. This represented a 55 percent growth on 2017’s 260 552. For Cyber Monday, the total amount was 176 595, a 36 percent growth on 2017’s 129 458.

“This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday figures surpassed 2017’s with more South Africans taking to online to do their transactions,” said Grunewald. “The year-on-year growth certainly reflects the growing popularity of these major shopping days despite the tougher economy experienced.”

Black Friday proved to be more popular among South Africans with 404 594 online transactions, a 55 percent growth from 260 552 in 2017, while for Cyber Monday this was 176 595, a 36 percent growth from 129 458 in 2017.

If those numbers were a little too much to process, here’s a handy infographic:

The most expensive transaction on Black Friday was R6 million. I feel like if you have that kind of cash to throw around, you probably don’t really need deals and savings.

If you’re reading this, I think we’d all really like to know what you bought…

[source:iol]