A survey conducted in November by One Hour Translation, the world’s largest online translation agency, revealed that Black Friday enjoys a double-digit popularity percentage in six countries outside the United States, while Cyber Monday tops out at only 4 percent outside of North America.
The international survey was conducted among 3,400 participants from eight developed countries – the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Australia and Japan – during the week preceding Black Friday. In its mission to examine consumer preferences in anticipation of end-of-year shopping events, One Hour Translation asked participants, “Which online shopping event have you been waiting for this year?” Respondents were allowed to pick more than one answer.
According to the results, Black Friday is particularly popular in Canada (about 26 percent), Spain (about 22 percent), France (about 21 percent), the UK and Germany (about 19 percent each), and to a lesser extent in Australia and Japan (about 10 percent in each country). On average, among the eight countries sampled in the survey, 17 percent of respondents were looking forward to Black Friday, compared to about 8 percent who were looking forward to Cyber Monday and about 3 percent who were looking forward to “Singles Day,” the Chinese holiday celebrating single people. The Singles Day shopping event, which takes place every year on November 11, was highly anticipated among 7.5 percent of respondents in Japan, but only by 6 percent in Spain and France, 4 percent in Canada, 3 percent in Germany, and 2 percent or less in Britain, Australia and the U.S.
Cyber Monday enjoyed a double-digit popularity percentage only in the U.S. and Canada.
Despite the fact that the survey was conducted online and was naturally geared towards online consumers, about two-thirds of respondents on average among the eight countries said that they were not looking forward to any online shopping events.
One Hour Translation (onehourtranslation.com) offers professional translation services to thousands of business customers around the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Professional translations are performed by more than 15,000 human translators who are located in more than 100 countries. The provide services in 98 languages and in more than 3,000 language pairs. Among their customers are Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, HP, Xerox and many more Fortune 500 companies.
