Looking for some guidance as you prepare for the peak holiday season?
Here’s a tip: Think beyond Black Friday.
With the explosive potential of each day from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, Black Friday is far from the only shopping holiday online sellers should prepare for.
This was one of several key takeaways from our recent webinar: Discover E-Commerce’s Best-Kept Secrets for Q4. The popular event combined knowledge from e-commerce and logistics experts at Newegg, ShipStation, and ChannelAdvisor to surface the best strategies for holiday selling in 2019.
In case you missed it, here are the highlights.
2 Trends That Will Impact 2019 Holiday Selling
1. A shorter season
Did you know the 2019 holiday season is six days shorter than it was in 2018?
After experiencing one of the longest Thanksgiving-to-Christmas e-commerce seasons last year, sellers are now faced with the shortest on record. Turkey Day falls on November 28, taking the Cyber 5 for a ride into December. This shift has numerous implications that you’ll need to be prepared for.
First, be sure to budget accordingly. While year-over-year revenue may not be as strong in November, there’s a chance you’ll see it rise the following month.
In addition, ensure you have processes in place to handle larger order volumes later in the season. The shorter season means you’ll have less time to handle an increased number of orders, so preparing inventory and logistics is essential.
2. An earlier start
By the time Halloween costumes are put away on November 1, holiday promotions will already be in full force. That means you’ll need to be ready with advertising extra early this year — and have promotions in place well before Black Friday hits.
Why? Because if you aren’t ready to start encouraging online sales before November 28, you’ll be missing out on a mountain of revenue potential.
Although Cyber Monday is still the biggest online shopping holiday, consumers are starting earlier and earlier. Thanksgiving Day shopping grew 28% year-over-year in 2018 — the biggest increase ever — and experts expect that Thursday-to-Wednesday momentum will continue in 2019.
In fact, based on analysis of sellers using the ChannelAdvisor platform, the strongest year-over-year increase in sales last year occurred on Thanksgiving Eve. With this in mind, be sure your systems are prepared for an influx of traffic starting Wednesday afternoon.
4 Strategies to Sell More This Holiday Season
1. Optimize your product content
Planning for peak season advertising can be so intensive that it’s easy to let product content fall by the wayside. And yet, that’s exactly what consumers are most interested in. Seven in ten shoppers want to learn about products via content instead of ads.
Set aside time to optimize your listings and personalize your campaigns. In addition to product titles, descriptions and bullets, be sure to prioritize your email campaigns since this is where most consumers get the information they need to make purchasing decisions.
2. Time your pricing just right
When it comes to price-based promotions during the peak season, timing is everything. Our e-commerce experts suggest focusing on increased traffic starting November 1, followed by price drops as you get closer to Black Friday.
You can also maximize your profits by adjusting pricing intelligently. The last thing you want to do is drop to your bottom price right out of the gate. Customers will continue to shop throughout the holiday season, so you’ll need to have a bank of offers ready if you want to stay competitive well into December.
For example, minimum order promotions can be a great way to ensure your average order value is preserved as you entice customers to engage with your deals. If you can’t offer a discount — such as “spend $100, get 10% off — consider using a free shipping strategy to incentivize consumers to increase basket size.
3. Diversify your marketplace portfolio
If you’re selling on Amazon and eBay, you already have a great start. But based on the latest findings, it’s time to ramp up marketplace expansion.
Half of all worldwide online sales come from marketplaces, which jump during peak season. An impressive 60% of consumers plan to shop on marketplaces during the 2019 peak holiday season.
Yet another reason to expand your marketplace presence: Different marketplaces make it easy to extend different options for shipping and promotions, which allows you to extend a variety of offers to consumers. Consider options that allow you to reach wider audiences, such as Newegg, Walmart and Rakuten.
Just keep in mind that you’ll still want to maintain some individual value on each platform. It wouldn’t make sense to diversify your channels only to offer the same promotional deals on all of them.
The trick is to stagger your offers across various marketplaces to maximize your impact all season long. This “price exclusivity” will help ensure each placement is primed for success in the best way, and also keeps your partners happy.
4. Extend your shipping capabilities
If you really want to generate as much revenue as possible this season, expanding to global markets is key. More than 80% of retailers worldwide agree that cross-border e-commerce has been profitable, and 70% of consumers purchase from foreign sites.
Global selling can be highly lucrative during peak seasons, to say the least.
Of course, extending your reach across international borders can feel like a logistics nightmare when you’re just getting started.
To avoid issues and keep things running smoothly, the key is to focus on shipping software that can help manage international components such as international labels and customs forms.
This is also a time when you’ll want to overcommunicate delivery times, shipping costs and related information, since these are likely to take longer and cost more for overseas fulfillment.
Looking for more insights you can use to get a bigger competitive advantage in the Q4 holiday season for 2019? We have plenty! Leading experts go into greater detail on each of the above trends and strategies in our recent webinar. Watch it on-demand now for practical suggestions from ChannelAdvisor, ShipStation and Newegg.
This post was contributed by Cindy Puryear, Partner Marketing Manager for ChannelAdvisor.
