Black Friday and Cyber Monday is just about 40 days away, are you ready? For eCommerce businesses and brands, the upcoming shopping season is almost a battleground. For most of the people, the Thanksgiving week it the beginning of their Christmas shopping, according to an Internet Retailer and Bizrate Insights survey of consumers in November 2018, 60% of consumers plan to spend more than half of their holiday shopping online. Among all the shopping days around Thanksgiving, Black Friday remains the most popular day to shop: 61% of the potential buyers say they’ll shop on Black Friday 2019. As for Cyber Monday, the average spending on it is continued to rise ever since 2005.
Make a move as early as October.
According to statistics from Prosper Insights & Analytics, 40% of consumers over 18 will start their holiday shopping at the end of October. This means that the “Black Friday Cyber Monday” marketing plan is supposed to be implemented by October at the latest. As we know, many online stores have launched Christmas promotions since the first week of October, attracting a lot of consumers to buy Halloween decorations, Thanksgiving gifts and Christmas products. In other words, those online stores and eCommerce brands owners made their plans as early as June and July, just in order to make a move in October. This tip may come a little late for the just starters, but it’s never too late to be prepared for the next year.
Get your website ready.
- Enhance the user experience of the mobile end.
The popularity of mobile devices and the development of mobile communication technology have brought the dominant position in mobile shopping. According to the online shopping data on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, 2018, mobile orders outperformed computer orders by 66% vs 34%. When people are getting used to lying on the sofa (or even sitting on the toilet) and shopping on their mobile phones, how a website looks on a mobile phone is becoming more and more important. This is important for the owners of independent websites, because the responsive design of large marketplaces like Amazon is already very reasonable, but if you own a Shopify, WooCoomerce, or WordPress website, it’s better to make more efforts in the design and development to ensure on the mobile end, users can easily find the products they want, add to shopping carts, pay, apply discount codes or coupons, input the shipping address and automatically save it for the next shopping. If users want to consult some questions, they can quickly find online help entrance, etc.
2. Add instant messenger(IM) on the website.
Make sure that customers and potential customers can find you easily during the holidays, losing orders because of late replies is the last thing we want to see. If you run an e-commerce website, it’s better to test several IM plug-ins. If you can’t maintain instant messaging due to labor shortage or other reasons, at the very least, make sure you check your inbox and respond to customer questions in a timely manner, as well as that the promotional page contains all the questions & answers that customers may ask.
3. Ensure your website can withstand the sharp increase in traffic.
The flood of traffic during the festival will seriously affect the loading speed of the website and even lead to website downtime. The Abstracta study found that 46% of users would not return to slow-loading sites. To solve this problem, you can use loadimpact. com or similar tools to test the load capacity of your website server. If the speed can not meet the requirements, consider replacing the host service provider in advance. However, Shopify’s website is hosted by Shopify, so Shopify users can skip this one. Probably this is one of the reasons why Shopify has become the hottest CRM for building e-commerce websites.
Ensure an adequate supply of products.
The worst thing happens in holiday sales is no enough inventory to send when customers’ orders increase, which is equivalent to all efforts in vain. Therefore, it is necessary to have a good stock plan with the suppliers and choose the right way to manage the inventory before the holidays arrive. NextSmartShip helps eCommerce business owners to integrate multiple suppliers and streamline the supply chain, through the easy to use fulfillment system and multi-platform integration, NextSmartShip customers can manage all the inventory centrally even when they have multiple suppliers and multiple online stores. The real-time updated data ensures out-of-stock and oversell never happens.
Reward old customers.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a good opportunity to get a connection with old customers and bring them back to the customer list. It’s a good idea to offer attractive discounts to regular customers by e-mail or send them greeting packs or gift packs. Sending subscription box is not as hard as you thought, NextSmartShip provides kitting service to put different products with different SKU in one package, and the custom packaging service will bring the festive atmosphere to the consumers to further strengthen their loyalty to your brand. Always keep this in mind, it’s much easier to retrieve an old customer than to develop a new one.
