Friday 28th of November will probably be one of the days e-commerce websites will remember for a long time. It was so big that some retailers might have thought that Christmas did come early.Although Black Friday is a big thing on the other side of the pond this year we saw a huge increase on sales and users searching for bargains. Below is a graph from Google trends, we can see a small increase in 2012, another relatively small increase in 2013 and a huge spike this year. Amazon reported that Black Friday was the busiest day on record, with sales that "surpassed all expectations". John Lewis was up 307% compared with Black Friday last year.

Originally Black Friday was "brought" to the UK by Amazon back in 2010 with little success for the first few years. This year more retailers followed the Amazon example with more promotions and bigger deals. Tesco teased TV viewers with ads promoting the discounts with out revealing the pricing for a few days asking users to visit their site at midnight.Why now?So why this huge increase in 2014? Firstly the offers, most retailers offered discounts between 2o%-40% something that usually happens on the sale period just after Christmas. There is no denial that the UK economy is improving the last few years, consumers feel more secure in their jobs and fuel prices are dropping with consumers having more disposable income.Virtual QueueSomething new that UK shoppers experienced is the "Virtual Queue", something usually happening during big ticket sales such as Olympics or on big events on Tickemaster and other similar websites. Curry's the electrical retailer left shoppes on it's website waiting up to an hour until the could get access to the website. Tesco direct crashed at midnight then followed the virtual queue method. Other websites that faced similar issues was ASDA Direct, Argos and John Lewis.