The Black Friday fever has already started taking over Romania. Last year, the first year when Romanian retailers – especially IT&C – came up with discounted offers, they had massive sales on the Black Friday. This year, others have joined the race. Now it's not only IT&C and online book stores, it's also real estate and tickets to events in Romania. The media has picked up the trend and also hopes for traffic increases, as it tries to cover more of the offers for Black Friday.

Real estate developers hopped on the same train, hoping Black Friday will bring them a small boost in sales. Office owners came up with promotional offers giving away free parking spaces and even three months free of rent if somebody signs the lease on November 23.

“It is the first time office building owners have adopted the Western method in offering bigger discounts to clients during the period of the last deals of the year, close to the winter holidays,” said Alexandru Petrescu, manager of ESOP Consulting. One office building will be finalized in April 2013, and is offering incentives for early leases, while another office building is giving a free parking space for each 40 sqm.

Some tourism agencies will also have special offers on November 23, with discounts of up to 40 percent on their travel packages. Mareea travel agency already announced offers 40 percent discounted.

On the event tickets side, the websites biletoo.ro and blt.ro will also offer 75 percent discounts on tickets on November 23. Last year, event tickets websites sold thousand of tickets on Black Friday.

Online retailer eMag.ro sold EUR 8 million worth of products last year on Black Friday, when around 1.1 million people visited their website. Competitor Flanco's sales were of EUR 6 million. For this year, eMag.ro has invested over EUR 200,000 in infrastructure and equipment to cope with the high number of visitors to their site. The retailer expects up to 100,000 visitors at the same time on the site on Black Friday. Everything was four times above expectations for eMag.ro last year, from the number of orders, to sales, and to errors, which they are trying to correct.

editor@romania-insider.com