As the year comes to an end and marks the beginning of the holiday season, shoppers are getting ready to make some of their biggest purchases of the year. Long gone are the days of buyers waiting outside stores at midnight to grab the best deals instead, we are in a new era where shoppers are constantly refreshing their browsers to check when the best deals are going live. With Cyber Week of 2021 making almost $33.9 billion in online sales, digital commerce is dominating holiday shopping, and online businesses need to brace themselves for the holiday sales frenzy that is coming. With this comprehensive guide, we bring to you the top eCommerce strategies that are a must-have to make the most out of the holiday season for your eCommerce business!
Top eCommerce Strategies to Prepare for the Holiday Sales
While over 75% of U.S. shoppers are planning to go online for their holiday shopping, the growing inflation in the U.S. is predicted to impact over 90% of the customers on how they carry on with their purchases. With the hypercompetitive state of this year’s CyberWeek sales and Christmas shopping, eCommerce businesses must be on top of their toes to fully leverage the holiday sales and successfully make a profit. Thus, online businesses need to have smart eCommerce strategies planned out to make impactful sales.
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Let us look into the top holiday sales and the best eCommerce strategies to use for them!
Black Friday Sales eCommerce Strategies
Black Friday is the name given to the Friday after Thanksgiving and is a reference to the term coined by officers in Philadelphia in the early 1960s to describe the rush due to large numbers of suburban tourists coming into the city to begin their holiday shopping. In modern times, Black Friday marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season across the USA. With Black Friday being one of the biggest sales of the year, where stores offer highly discounted prices and often open early to cash in on the rush, having a strategy to boost online sales is prudent.
The must-have eCommerce strategies for Black Friday Sales are as follows:
- Get Ready from Thanksgiving: While stores typically hold out their best deals for Black Friday proper, most businesses start going on sales leading up to Black Friday. These early sales usually get started from Thanksgiving. Thus, having eCommerce strategies for the business ready days before Black Friday is essential to attract early shoppers.
- Go All in On Deals: Small discounts of 15% to 20% will not make the cut for Black Friday sales. It is the only sale of the year where a store can go all in on the discount without having to fear the loss of brand integrity. Big discounts of 50% and above make for a compelling deal to bring in big sales.
- Entice Your VIP Customers: The best way to make customers spend big is to motivate existing big-spender customers to make even bigger purchases. Sending curated mail with exclusive offers and discounts to VIP customers can help bolster both sales and customer loyalty. Highly curated emails for VIP customers can have a whopping 16.17% open rates as compared to 9.95% open rates for unsegmented emails. Moreover, by making the offers timed-exclusives, eCommerce businesses can leverage the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) to drive a sense of urgency for shoppers to buy now.
- Begin Advertisements in Advance: While everyone and their neighbor know when the Black Friday sales will be going live, running advertisements a few days prior to the actual sale can help buy traffic and build a social audience. Advertising on social media platforms through optimized content can help the advertisement reach the right audience and remain on their minds when the sale goes live.
- Having a Robust eCommerce Platform: Preparing in advance, targeted advertising and aggressive email marketing will not mean anything if the eCommerce store cannot handle the incoming surge of greater website traffic. Choosing the right eCommerce platform that offers great server uptimes and can effortlessly manage the increase in traffic is necessary to ensure the business can capitalize on every incoming shopper on the webstore.
Cyber Monday Sales eCommerce Strategies
With Black Friday being the beginning of the Cyber Week sales, Cyber Monday is the conclusion of it and takes place on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday was coined in 2005 and was created by retailers to encourage shoppers to buy online. Since its inception in 2005, Cyber Monday has become the paramount online shopping experience for customers across the U.S.
The top eCommerce strategies to have for increased Cyber Monday sales include:
- Stock Up on Inventory: The last thing an eCommerce should do is to say no to a customer due to the lack of inventory. Picking and ordering the products that will go on sale should be done as early as possible to reduce out-of-stock scenarios during the sale. Using reports and analytics for the most in-demand items for an eCommerce store can allow business owners to make data-driven purchasing decisions to stack up the right items in the necessary quantity.
- Safeguard Against Scalpers and Frauds: During the Cyber Monday sales, tech items tend to be the hottest items for customers to purchase. High-value hardware like computer processors, graphics cards, and gaming consoles tend to bring in the most buyers. However, fraudulent purchases and scalpers can prevent real customers from making their purchases. According to a study on online fraud in 2021, retailers and e-commerce merchants in the United States lost about 3.60 U.S. dollars due to fraudulent purchases. Having a purchase quantity limiter, two-step authentication, and other security measures in place can help prevent fraudulent purchases and allow genuine customers to make their purchases.
- Have an Order Fulfilment Strategy: Logistics and order fulfillment are one of the more complex aspects of managing an eCommerce business. Having a proper order fulfillment strategy can help improve order dispatch speed and reduce errors. Through outsourcing supply chain order fulfillment operations to third-party logistics solution providers, eCommerce businesses can streamline inventory management, pick-up, and packaging, and make deliveries quickly. Additional facilities that third-party logistics experts can offer include next-day delivery, which can help improve customer trust and loyalty.
- Retarget Past Customers: Past customers are far easier to convert into high-profit sales than new customers. Existing customers already know the type of services and experience they are likely to receive when making a purchase of the eCommerce store, and thus have a level of trust for making when making returning purchases. ECommerce businesses will also have relevant data on their existing customers which can be leveraged to make more targeted and effective sales.
- Try Upselling and Cross-Selling: Offering heavy discounts is the go-to strategy for motivating customers to make bigger purchases. However, putting a 60% discount on a $20 item will not bring meaningful profits. Bundling an item with relevant upselling or cross-selling products can help businesses make the most out of their stock. Upselling and cross-selling increase the average order value placed by the customer while fulfilling a complete set of needs.
Green Monday Sales eCommerce Strategies
Green Monday is the biggest shopping day for Christmas and takes place on the second Monday of December. It is the prime sale for shoppers rushing to make last-minute Christmas gift purchases and take advantage of deals. The phrase “Green Monday” was coined in 2007 by eBay after recording the most profitable sales on the second Monday of December.
Some of the eCommerce strategies that can be implemented to boost Green Monday sales are as follows
- Convert Seasonal Shoppers into Year-Round Customers: The holiday shopping season is a brief period of boost in the overall sales for the year. Strategies for converting short-term holiday shoppers into year-round customers can boost the bottom line with perpetual sustainable growth. Being active throughout the year on social media platforms, sending out post-sale emails to your subscribers, and retargeted advertisements can expose potential customers to new upcoming products and convert them into sales.
- Consider a Mobile First Approach: With everyone having a smartphone in their hands, online shopping through smartphones is becoming the more popular way for customers to make eCommerce purchases. Mobile commerce sales in the United States exceeded 360 billion dollars for the year 2021. Not capitalizing on mobile users during sales peak will mean leaving out the biggest chunk of profit on the table. Having a mobile-friendly eCommerce platform or a dedicated mobile app for users to make direct purchases from their smartphones can convert a more profitable segment of the total target market.
- Use Chat to Turn Browsers into Buyers: A little nudge can go a long way. While advertisements, email marketing, and mobile optimization can bring customers to the webstore, converting the incoming traffic into a sale can be a big challenge. Using a chatbot or a dedicated team to manage conversations with shoppers on topics like questions about products and shipping details, getting a discount coupon to work, or assisting them in figuring out what to buy can drastically shift the scale towards converting a casual visitor to a webstore into a customer.
- Use Amazon as an Additional Sales Channel: In July of 2022, customers purchased more than 300 million items on Amazon. With the massive existing customer base of Amazon, using its online marketplace as a secondary sales channel can help eCommerce businesses to almost double their sales. Through Amazon Seller Central, vendors can directly sell their products to customers across the globe through Amazon. As an additional feature Amazon also manages the order fulfillment pipeline. For verified retailers manufacturing their own products, Amazon also offers Microsites to make them stand out from the rest. Check out our guide on how to become a seller on Amazon Seller Central to get started.
- Implement a Buy Now, Pay Later System: Holiday shopping can be a costly affair for most shoppers. Customers willing to spend big may refrain from making a big purchase because it would completely disrupt their budget before the next payday. While credit cards can allow some customers to buy now and pay later, most may not own a credit card. By allowing payment installments and other similar buy now pay later offers, customers can do all the shopping they want to do right away, guilt-free.
Boxing Day Sales eCommerce Strategies
Boxing Day is a holiday celebrated after Christmas with the earliest recorded mention of the day in 1833. The day originated as a holiday to give gifts to the poor, but today Boxing Day has evolved into a shopping holiday. With Boxing Day falling after Christmas, many businesses may overlook it in their sales strategy. However, the day is also a big sales day with many shoppers spending their Christmas gift money or making purchases for the New Year.
The best eCommerce strategies to drive sales for Boxing Day include:
- New Year Resolution Products: After the carefree indulgences of Christmas, new resolutions for the New Year are what will be on people’s minds. From self-improvement books to health, well-being, self-care, and fitness products are likely to be hot sellers. ECommerce businesses retailing such products should put those items in the spotlight during the sale for a quick sales conversation.
- Run Clearance Sale: It is the end of the year and by offering steep discounts clear out stocks can be cleared out for new inventory for the upcoming year. By slashing prices on leftover stock, stores can grab the last-moment shoppers looking for that final best deal of the year to make their purchases. Clearance sales help mitigate any losses for the remaining inventory and have businesses ready with a better budget for fresh stocks in the upcoming year of 2023
- Streamline the Checkout Process: If the customer reaches the checkout page, then they have already made up their mind to make a purchase. However, a poor checkout process can cause frustration to a customer and lead to abandoned cart scenarios. Optimizing the checkout page by making the process as smooth as possible, so the customer doesn’t leave before completing the purchase. Simplified one-page checkouts or enabling guest checkouts can help in streamlining the checkout process.
- Enable Abandoned-Cart Notifications: Customers might leave the website with a full shopping cart without making the purchase. Sending reminders through email or mobile notifications can help remind them of their abandoned cart while convincing them to go through with the purchase.
- Provide Shoppers with Custom Shipping Options: Some shoppers wait until the last minute to place their orders while others may buy gifts months in advance to get their desired at a discount price during the sale. Offering a variety of shipping options during checkout can make the decision to purchase much easier.
APPSeCONNECT – The Perfect Automation Platform to Add to Your eCommerce Strategy for Business Success
With all the above eCommerce strategies in place, online businesses can be confident in getting a massive uptick during holiday sales. During the holiday season, online sales grew by a significant 8.6 percent for the USA in 2021 alone. However, the growing bulk of sales orders means a logistics nightmare for manually managing and monitoring business-critical data. While dedicated applications may be implemented for a business to manage its individual discrete processes, like an ERP or a CRM application, the isolated databases of those applications remain a hurdle to the scalability of operations.
Thus, a robust Business Process Automation (BPA) platform is mandated to allow seamless real-time bidirectional data sync across all line-of-business applications. With APPSeCONNECT’s robust next gen iPaaS solution, eCommerce businesses can achieve the seamless end-to-end automation they need to successfully leverage their growing sales order and bring back home the gift of bountiful profit during the holiday season.
With the help of APPSeCONNECT, eCommerce can get the following benefits:
- Improves inventory management and monitoring
- Streamlines order tracking through notifications
- Centralizes business data for improved collaboration
- Allows seamless integration with amazon seller central
- Automate shipping for faster order fulfillment
- Eliminates data silos to improve productivity
- Reduces manual data transfers to remove data redundancies
Conclusion
With holidays approaching, both businesses and consumers are looking forward to the seasonal sales to make the biggest bang for their buck. While online holiday sales are expected to continue booming in the years to come, eCommerce businesses being prepared to leverage it to the fullest requires having proper eCommerce strategies in place to stand out from the crowd. From Black Friday to Boxing Day having structured eCommerce strategies optimized for each of them is the way to improve sale conversion. Moreover, implementing a robust integration and BPA platform can ensure all the bulk data for the sales order is managed seamlessly and error-free. With all the eCommerce strategies offered by this guide and a robust BPA platform in place, any eCommerce business can achieve success this holiday season!
