QVC Black Friday Marathon Starts Run for Cyber Monday

Black Friday just got what it needed to become an official event, its own telethon, and QVC is providing it.

But it isn’t just about Black Friday.

At 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving, QVC kicks off The New Black Friday and keeps it going until midnight Friday. Oh, and you can bet the broadcast will be filled with admonitions to stay out of stores, mobbed with customers gone mad in pursuit of a bargain, and to enjoy shopping from the sofa with an electronic retail pioneer.

Over the marathon’s course, QVC will run a range of its broadcast features, including three Today’s Special Value, one of the retailer’s renown limited time only deals. In fact, QVC will offer its viewers specially priced offers in every hour of programming. The Black Friday broadcast will include holiday gift-giving ideas, including spotlights on the Nintendo Wii gaming systems, Panasonic high-definition video cameras and Clarisonic Facial Cleansing Systems.

It’s fair to ask just how many shoppers who have never bought a gift from a television show are going to shift from store purchasing on Black Friday of all days. Not many, and QVC knows it. Some consumers may be frightened into staying home by the tales of rage and woe that they see as television news does its annual mall-mayhem reports, but the numbers who shift to television purchases aren’t really important.

What’s important is the Internet. By running its Black Friday marathon, QVC will generate publicity that will drive more consumers to check out its website, as the same kind of hourly bargains that appear in its broadcast are slated for QVC.com, and that’s a very big deal.

QVC.com is one of the biggest electronic commerce sites operating, recently ranked No. 11 in sales just behind Best Buy. In 2007, its online sales surpassed $1 billion for the first time. QVC also ranks as one of the one of the best online retailers. This year, it came in tied for third in the Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index administered by ForeSee Results and FGI Research, just behind Netflix (NFLX) and Amazon (AMZN).

Given its scale and success in making shoppers happy, anything that QVC can do to help consumers get past the late night television humor about cubic zirconium and commemorative plates, and get them browsing its Keurig coffee makers and Dell computers is going to be a big boost in the long run. QVC may have pretty much ignored Black Friday before. As the event has gotten more scrutiny, though it figures to use Black Friday to its best advantage. That’s online, because Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday, and, according to the eHoliday Survey from Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, and BIGresearch, 87 percent of retailers will have a special promotion for Cyber Monday, up from 84 percent last year and 72 percent in 2007. With its Black Friday promotion, QVC is stealing a weekend’s march on a lot of its e-rivals.