Royal Mail has released a list of the 10 busiest towns and cities in terms of orders made by customers on Black Friday. Most were provincial towns away from the main urban centres of the UK, with only Exeter (number 3) and Bournemouth (number 4) being cities of any great size in the list.

The list in order of centres of busiest e-commerce shopping on Black Friday through the Royal Mail delivery network was: Norwich, Dorchester, Exeter, Bournemouth, Swansea, Aberdeen, Torquay, Inverness, Taunton, and Lancaster.

One of the things that leaps out about this list is that many of the hotspots around the UK do not have a large number of chain stores. Dorchester for example is known for its large number of non chain shops, and is over an hour away from the main shopping town in Dorset, the Bournemouth / Poole conurbation. Shoppers in search of a wider range of goods away from the artisan shops of Dorchester may well have been online to save on the drive to nearby cities. Norwich and Exeter are medium sized cities that have similar restrictions in terms of consumer choice.

Shoppers from the towns will be receiving their goods today (Monday) and tomorrow (Tuesday) on the Royal Mail 24 and 48 hour services, having ordered them on Black Friday and on the Saturday.

Such insights will be useful for e-commerce retailers as they seek to make sense of their customer base. London, Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol didn’t figure in these results, which would suggest that residents in and near those cities would have gone shopping on their high streets instead. Perhaps for future planning the e-tailer should focus their marketing on customers away from ‘that London’ and they may increase their revenues through more provincial areas?