Black Friday madness: South Africans swipe over R500m by noon
On Black Friday, South Africans have already swiped over R500 million in transactions by midday.
Image: RON AI
As of midday on Black Friday, around 1.5 million transactions worth more than R500 million had been settled through two payment systems.
These are figures collated from information from Ecentric Payment Systems and Peach Payments.
Live anonymised shopping data can be viewed on their platforms to see what South Africans are getting up to on what could well be the biggest shopping day of the year.
IOL research predicts that this year’s Black Friday spend could hit between R146 billion and R153 billion.
According to Peach Payments’ dashboard, about two-thirds of all shoppers were in the Western Cape, followed by Gauteng at almost a third, with the rest of deal-making thinly spread across the rest of the country.
Rahul Jain, CEO and co-founder of Peach, told IOL that “it's one of the biggest days of the year for our industry and for businesses”.
Tills were ringing at speed, with Ecentric showing that the quickest purchase took 51 seconds to complete, with more than 1,400 transactions being approved every minute.
While people were spending an average of just over R500 per transaction, one South African swiped for a whopping R210,680, Ecentric’s dashboard shows.
The most valuable deals settled by Peach were R378,392 on travel, at around am, and R336,262 on retail items.
South Africans were up and at it early this morning, with transactions already being recorded at midnight.
It seems that the busiest time in the shops was around 11am, closely followed by 10am.
“Our early morning transaction counts from midnight to 9am are already double compared to 2024,” said Jain.
Online sales alone this year could reach R130 billion. This is according to research done by World Wide Worx in collaboration with Mastercard, Peach Payments and Ask Afrika.
E-commerce, the report said, is expected to capture nearly 10% of the country’s total retail market in 2025.
IOL BUSINESS