Black Friday & Cyber Monday | eCommerce Professionals Guide
Ready or not, the holidays are just around the corner. Black Friday is considered an event that marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season. In addition, Black Friday has been the busiest shopping day of the year in the US since 2005. Today, it has become a worldwide trend, especially with the rise of the eCommerce industry.
We have looked at the past years’ reports and analyzed the patterns for you to prepare the winning eCommerce strategy for the upcoming shopping season. Keep scrolling.
BFCM
Before we start, let’s bring up the BFCM term, as we will use it throughout the article when referring to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping season and potential strategies evolving around those events from the perspective of eCommerce professionals.
This year Black Friday falls on November 25, the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. Anyhow, keep in mind that you can, like many other brands, announce deals even before the official date, as soon as the last week of November starts.
The belief is that the term originated in the ’60s when police officers brought it up to describe the chaos people caused for holiday shopping.
While Black Friday is both an in-store and online shopping event, Cyber Monday is an online-only event that takes place on Monday following Black Friday. Anyhow, for eCommerce businesses, both days represent an equal opportunity to improve pricing strategy and boost sales.
The events’ dates vary from year to year as Black Friday is related to Thanksgiving, which always falls last Thursday in November. Cyber Monday will take place online on Monday, November 28th, worldwide. The term dates to 2005, but the event took over the internet in 2014 when Cyber Monday became the biggest online shopping day in the United States, with over $2 billion in sales.
Post-Covid Customer Behavior
In the year preceding the pandemic, there were 19% of online shoppers during the Black Friday sales, while during the pandemic year and 2020 holiday season, the number of people who shopped online increased by 22%.
In 2020, the world changed, and as a result, holiday shopping traditions and all the joys and rituals of shopping have been affected. With all the covid-19 precautions and safety measures in place, the shopping experience varied from country to a country, store to store. In the US, the general rule was that masks were mandatory and the number of people in the store was limited, so the lines outside were endless, and when it came to clothing stores, the changing cabins were locked.
Even before the biggest shopping events, it was clear that the shopping experience during the holiday season would not differ much from how it has been since the pandemic started. Even though the traditionalists in the United States were disappointed, they did not plan to give up their holiday shopping rituals. On the other hand, many understood that the Black Friday in-store shopping experience was no longer exciting and shifted to online shopping.
After 2020 customer behavior drastically changed. As we all witnessed, there was a massive shift to online shopping. eCommerce professionals should know that the number of people who shop online is still rising, therefore, the upcoming period serves perfectly to wrap up the business year on a high level in terms of sales and profitability.
BFCM Trends
As emphasized several times throughout the article, the extensive growth in eCommerce reshaped the idea of Black Friday shopping even before the pandemic hit. The graphs below indicate a continuous increase in online sales over the last eight years, both for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Below, we extracted the essential data from SaleCycle’s 2022 Black Friday Ecommerce Strategy & Stats Report based on analyzing 49,433,226 baskets created and 409,652,513 user sessions for eCommerce professionals to have the insight and create the winning strategy for the holiday shopping season.
- Black Friday transitioned from a brick-and-mortar only to an online shopping event, and now the trend has been caught that more and more shoppers prefer mobile commerce. 74% of all online sessions came from mobile devices. Tip: make your website/store mobile-friendly.
- Last year, a week before Black Friday, the cart abandonment rate was 81.66%, while after the event, the percentage decreased to 77.74%. Tip: Consider rescuing abandoned carts and bringing this to shoppers’ attention using the right tool at the right time.
- On Black Friday online traffic varies sector by sector. The product categories with the lowest cart abandonment rate were fashion and airline, while the highest abandoned product categories were gardening and electronics. Anyhow, the traffic volume is greater than what your website is used to. Tip: Optimize your website speed to make sure it can host all the visitors.
Price2Spy BFCM Checklist
As hinted, we have outlined the key steps you should follow to optimize your online store and website for the upcoming shopping season. It is estimated that this Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022 will break previous records in traffic and sales worldwide.
The beginning of the holiday season hits hard every year, along with Thanksgiving shopping, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, making November the peak online shopping month. Each retailer has an opportunity to take part and hit record-high sales volume by creating an effective business plan and optimizing business strategies.
You can find many checklists online, Shopify’s 27 tips to prepare for BFCM, and Hootsuite’s 11 Black Friday eCommerce tactics, but we decided to sum it all up for you and go straight to the point. Price2Spy BFCM checklist is especially significant if you have started your preparation late. Here is what you should focus on:
1. Check your competitor’s prices | Pricing Strategy
Price monitoring is crucial here. Just as you are adjusting your prices based on the competitors’ repricing actions through the regular months, you should have an accurate and reliable insight into the real-time changes and historical trends during November.
Price monitoring is time-consuming, even on regular shopping days, not to mention the frequency of price changes during BFCM days. The crucial step is process automatization to save time and increase efficiency. Find a tool that can track, analyze, and reprice product prices for you based on the pricing strategy you define as the winning one.
2. Define your promotional strategy | Marketing Strategy
- Start advertising early and build anticipation. Define your marketing strategy early as shoppers start preparing early, just as eCommerce professionals do. Let your website visitors know there is a reason to come back and shop for your products once the Black Friday sales start. Through early advertising, retailers and brands build anticipation via countdown timers, social media, or email marketing.
- Professionals advise preparing several well-segmented email marketing campaigns and starting to conduct them early. Utilize email marketing to personalize your offers, inform customers, build anticipation, and offer special deals, promo codes, and early access to BFCM sales. Experienced eCommerce professionals state that the more segmented the email marketing campaign is, the higher revenue per customer will be. Keep in mind the statistics about the abandonment cart and utilize them to draw shoppers’ attention.
- Tailor promotional strategies to the shopping chaos ahead of us and high traffic volume. As mentioned, segment your customers early, and offer them special deals and promos. Here is the suggestion: give them an option for early access to Black Friday sales or offer special delivery terms. Create special discount codes for your VIP customers and new customers who shop for the first time. Give shoppers a reason to distinguish your offer from competitors. Make it exclusive and personal.
3. Persuade customers to purchase more | Consider bundle pricing
A bundle pricing strategy boosts profit growth. By encouraging customers to shop for more items than they intended, businesses increase the average order value without having to lower product prices. Instead of lowering the price of one product, you can recommend a bundle valuable for customers in terms of needs and savings.
Specific industries offer BOGO of BOGOHO promotions, usually irresistible to shoppers. Brands invite customers to purchase one item and get another one for free or to get a chance to buy another at a half-off price. Sounds like a great deal for all parties. Also, don’t miss a chance to bundle complementary products, as those are the most likely to be purchased both sooner or later, like shoes and socks or notebooks and pencils.
4. Optimize website for SEO | Product Page Optimization
Ideally, website optimization is an ongoing process. Anyhow, this is just a reminder to do the final preparation and check whether you have done everything possible to reassure you rank higher than your competitors.
Start from the product page optimization and website performance, as both massively affect SEO ranking. The website loading speed not only influences website SEO ranking but also determines customers’ experience, which massively determines conversions fluctuation.
Revise website product pages, as those will drive the most traffic in the upcoming period. Focus on optimizing product descriptions, and use this opportunity to structure a user-friendly product page and speed up the checkout process.
Last Check
You can find professional and authoritative content online for smooth preparation for the upcoming shopping season. However, if you haven’t thought about taking extraordinary actions yet, you have no time for thorough strategy development. In that case, take this article as a guide.
As you might notice, we did not advise massive discounts. On the contrary, we emphasized the importance of website optimization and gave examples of effective promotional strategies in terms of approaches and methods. Regarding prices, rely on automated repricing tools to save time and stay competitive.
We wish you a successful and profitable shopping season!
