Black Friday Highlights A Growing Cross-Border Ecommerce Opportunity

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday have proved a hit for merchants and payments processors once again, breaking ecommerce records while curbing concerns about post-inflation spending.

US consumer spending rose 8.2% to $41.1bn during the five-day period from Thanksgiving through to Cyber Monday, with Black Friday alone seeing a rise of 10% to $10.8bn, according to Adobe Analytics. Payment processors have benefitted too, with Stripe and Adyen processing volumes of $31bn and $34bn respectively during the weekend.

This translated into a 31% rise in cross-border orders for Shopify – a significantly higher growth rate than the previous year and higher than the growth in total orders, at 23%. The takeaway is that cross-border sales aren't just rising fast, but also contributing more to the company's revenues than in previous years.

While cross-border ecommerce spending appears to be on the rise, when it comes to making purchases in different currencies, there remain significant challenges in terms of pricing transparency.

In many cases, a shopper purchasing an item in another currency on their credit or debit card will not know how much they will be charged for the currency conversion until they receive their statement. Further analysis has previously shown that in many cases the charges incurred by consumers exceed those stated on banks' terms and conditions.

Data collected by my own company FXC Intelligence for the Financial Stability Board to benchmark against this target shows that person-to-business (P2B) payments, of which a significant portion is cross-border card transactions, are on average still above the 1% goal.

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