Black Friday, more like a Black Lie
A price analysis of the biggest sale of the year in UAE. How stores manipulate prices to make so-called sales profitable.
Black Friday in GCC:
GCC(UAE, Saudia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar) has its own different names for black Friday. It usually comes from the stores. some stores call it yellow Friday other have names like cyber Friday or blessed Friday. But they all have huge sales, especially in UAE. And just like any other thing they like to do it big, so it's not just one day but usually a 5–7 days sale around the same dates as black Friday.
E-commerce is an ever-growing industry in UAE and has been the key place for shoppers to take advantage of such sales in the post-covid era. For the purpose of this article, we will look at online stores and marketplaces.
Most Searched Products:
Top Stores of UAE combined have millions of products listed on their websites and every sale season thousands of these products get discounts. Of course, it is too much effort to keep an eye on the prices of all of these. So for this article, I look at the prices of the top most searched products for the period of sale. The top 3 of these that we see in this article are the following. You can find the rest on the Github repo.
1. Apple iPhone 13 Pro 128GB Silver
2. Sony PlayStation5 Console
3. MacBook Pro 13inch With Touch Bar
Data Analysis of Products:
For all products, I have taken data points from the start of October till mid-December. In these charts, on Y-axis we have a value that is the price of the product in UAE dirham(AED) and on X-axis we have CreatedDate. Each line on the graph represents a store’s price trend for that product. We have two lines for each store, One is for DiscountedPrice that is the price after the sale, while the other is for Fullprice that is the price before the discount as shown on the website of that store.
The area highlighted in salmon color is the period of the sale season i-e 18-29 Nov 2021. The black Friday 2021 was on 26 Nov. You can play around with the graphs and see the data from a specific store or date. For legal purposes, I can only refer to stores with numbers but this includes all top stores in UAE where that product was listed.
Let's look at the price trends of these products one by one.
1. Apple iPhone 13 Pro 128GB Silver:
Iphone 13 was no doubt the most anticipated product of the season and everyone including me was looking out for a discount on this one. I kept waiting for the prices to drop but that never happened instead what happened, looked something like this.
The official price for this specific model of iPhone set by Apple is AED 4199. but as you can see even from the very beginning most of the stores are actually selling it for a lot more.
We can see that Store_1 and Store_2 both hiked their prices at the end of October and during the sales period only Store_2 reduced the price, still higher than what it was at the end of October.
Just to be clear, even on stores showing steady retail prices of AED 4199, the product was out of stock for most of the period. I know this because I ended up buying it for a lot higher price 💩. Only Store_9 actually reduced the price for the period.
2. Sony PlaySation5 Console:
Another much-anticipated product during this season was Sony’s new gaming console PlayStation 5. Anyone who tried to get their hands on this for themselves or to gift someone special for Christmas knows the pain of trying to find it in stock. The price trend for Playstation looked like this.
Although they all sell for different prices, for stores Store_1, Store_4, and Store_79, the price didn't change before or during the sale.
For me, the most interesting trend here was for Store_9. You can see how they gradually increased price in steps every few days before the sale and on the day of the sale they not only increased the final discounted price from AED 3240 to AED 3331 but also hiked the list price shown on their website from AED 3240 to AED 3599 to put a 10% discount tag when in reality you had a better deal before the sale.
Store_2 follows a similar trend of gradually hiking the price and then displaying a high list price to give the illusion of huge sales deals. Store_24 actually gave a discount on the list price they provided but they also increased the discounted price during the sale.
3. MacBook Pro 13inch With Touch Bar:
Another most-searched item on our list is Apple’s new Macbook pro. This all-rounder work machine was available in a lot of stores.
For this product, Store_1, Store_23, Store_8, and Store_9 didn't really make any changes for the sale period.
Store_7 updated their prices not on 26 but instead on the 28th of November which happens to be the one day before Cyber-Monday, another international sale day just like black Friday. They used the same scheme of increasing the list price enough to show the discount while actually selling the product for a higher price than before.
Store_2 had the weirdest trend of all. But at the end of the day, They also sold it for more price on black Friday than they did before that. However, interestingly they did put the product for a sale on Cyber-Monday i-e 29 Nov.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, we can say that instead of giving discounts, most stores are actually hiking the prices to make profits and are using cheap tricks to show big discount banners on their websites such as increasing the list price. And it seems that you can get better deals by just getting the product instead of actually waiting for the sale.
However, these are some of the most in-demand products we are talking about. Stores have hundreds of other products on sale and you might be able to get good deals on some of them. Making a judgment on just these handful of the products seems unfair. But looking at the price trends and how the stores manipulate the prices it's highly unlikely that you will be able to get something actually good out of such sales.
At the end of the day, the most important question that arises from such trends is an ethical one. Is it morally okay for stores to lie and show fake discounts while making more profit?
DATA and Analysis Code:
I would like to thank Gobazzar for all the data required for this analysis that included the price history of the products and the most searched products on the platform for the period of this sale. Gobazzar is a real-time price comparison platform in GCC with millions of products and to see the price history of the above three products you can visit the following links Apple iPhone 13 Pro 128GB Silver, Sony PlayStation5 Console, MacBook Pro 13inch With Touch Bar.
The CSV file of data and the python notebook of my work is available on the GitHub repo here with 4 other products info.
