Amazon extends Black Friday into 12-day promotion

Amazon UK is launching its Black Friday offers this week and is extending its promotion to 12-days, as it looks to offer millions of pounds worth of savings to help customers get an early start on their Christmas shopping.

The 12-days of pre-Christmas offers will start today, November 14 and will run until November 25, and will offer double the number of deals compared to last year’s event, which lasted for a week.

As with last year, Amazon will launch limited-time 'lightning deals' regularly during the 12-day promotion, which Amazon Prime members will have an exclusive 30-minute early access period. Amazon states that deals will be available from day one and new deals will become available as often as every five minutes.

Deals will be available across fashion, home accessories, beauty, electronics and toys.

Black Friday, which falls on November 25, has become a highly-anticipated date in the UK shopping calendar, with Amazon selling more than 7.4 million items during last year’s Black Friday, at a rate of 86 items per second.

To cope with demand this year, which it claims will be its “biggest Christmas on record”, Amazon has stated that it has invested heavily in its UK infrastructure, including creating 3,500 permanent full-time jobs this year across its head offices, development centre, fulfilment centres and customer service centre, as well as opening two new fulfilment centres this year, in Manchester and Coalville.

“In response to positive customer feedback for Black Friday deals, we are introducing The Black Friday Sale – 12 days of fantastic deals on must-have gifts and products, saving our customers millions of pounds,” said Doug Gurr, UK country manager, Amazon. “We’re also thrilled to have over a thousand small businesses featuring in our Black Friday Sale, broadening the selection for our customers and enabling those businesses to boost their sales in the run up to Christmas.”