Someone spent over R750,000 in a single transaction on Black Friday

At least four of South Africa’s major banks recorded substantial increases in Black Friday shopping activity in 2024.

The country’s biggest bank, Standard Bank, told MyBroadband that transaction volumes on Black Friday increased 10.81% year-on-year, while values jumped 4.41%.

The grocery and supermarket category accounted for the largest number of transactions by value among Standard Bank customers, with roughly 27% of the total. This was followed by retail clothing and footwear at 11% of the total transaction value.

Standard Bank said that although most people shopped in person, online spending’s proportion of sales volumes increased by 8.3% compared to last year.

Digital wallet transactions also grew 37.53% in volume and 48.16% in value.

Standard Bank’s biggest Black Friday spender spent R758,677 on an international accommodation booking, while one of its customers made a single in-store transaction of R400,000 at a wholesaler.

Standard Bank also revealed that one of its customers performed 193 transactions at grocery stores during Black Friday, while another transacted 104 times on home furnishings.

Another of South Africa’s Big Four banks — Absa — had also recorded an increase of 20% in transaction volumes by midday on Friday and expected spending to accelerate towards the end of the day.

At that point, the single biggest transaction by one of its customers was R638,000, also for an international holiday booking.

Absa executive for card issuing and rewards, Tshipi Alexander, attributed the increase to slightly different timing.

“Unlike previous years, where the event fell earlier than the largest payday of the 25th, this year aligns with payday for many consumers, driving higher spending power and a greater willingness to spend early this weekend,” Alexander said.

Absa was still processing the changes in its year-on-year transaction values at the time of publication.

Big bump for the budget bank

Lower-income-focused bank Capitec said its customers spent R25.42 billion over Black Friday and Saturday, 27% more than over the same period last year.

Its Capitec Pay platform recorded 1.7 million transactions over the weekend, a 54.7% jump from 2023.

The biggest single transaction recorded by a Capitec customer was R287,536 on a grocery store purchase.

The second largest transaction was R245,590 in the home improvements and hardware category.

The table below summarises the biggest transactions recorded on Black Friday by customers from the four banks that shared their spending data.

It should be noted that these values are for single transactions and not total spending by a single customer, which could be substantially higher.

Shoprite featuring prominently

Capitec and Discovery Bank also revealed interesting statistics about the most popular stores where their customers chose to spend their money on Black Friday.

Capitec said the most popular grocery retailer on the day was Shoprite, which processed 892,408 payments, while Clicks was the most popular pharmacy retailer with 304,000 payments.

In overall online retail, Takealot.com dominated with 52,000 orders from Capitec customers, while Shein ruled supreme as the preferred online fashion retailer, with 13,666 transactions.

Discovery did not share the number of transactions per retailer but provided the top 10 retailers for online and in-store spending by values and volumes.

Woolworths was the top retailer for in-store transactions among Discovery Bank customers — both in values and volumes.

Takealot accounted for the highest total transaction value of online retailers, but Shoprite’s Checkers Sixty60 had the highest number of purchases.

Checkers also featured second in terms of the value of in-store transactions.

The tables below summarise the top 10 most popular in-store and online retailers among Discovery Bank customers on Black Friday.