It was 1994, when the Sting audio CD was first bought online for $12.48. Amazon was then more of a search engine and the term online market place was still eluding the puberty. We have come a long way from there. The internet has become a phenomenon and ecommerce its produce.
The winter is coming and even if it doesn’t take a thousand years to be the coldest one, it does bring cold winds with it. But for the realm of the ecommerce entrepreneurs winter gets hotter and hotter. The winter is never cold for them!
The 4th Quarter every year brings in the opportunities for the online retailers as it instigates a shopping spree starting from October with Halloween and continues till Christmas! The winter commerce turns the tables in terms of revenue generation for all the online players. The sales multiply as soon as the festival commences. It is one of the biggest festive events that takes place in the world. With a healthy US Economy, lesser unemployment and increase in incomes, it is estimated that the people would buy more again this year. You knew that all, alright!
Here’s the Why:
More connected devices – simple!
Over 8 Billion smartphones across the world embark the expectancy of a gigantic shift towards online sales. And the festive season is the grand finale to equal the scores.
The winter shopping season which began with Halloween and it is to be followed by the holiday weekend of Thanksgiving (23 November), Black Friday (24 November) & Cyber Monday (27 November). Should there be any better time to cover up (or catch up) for all the losses you may have bared the entire year. You can attract the customers with massive discounts and give your users the ease of shopping at their convenience by providing a hassle-free user experience.
It’s not an easy task and all you eCom players flex your muscles and grab the opportunity as the winter holidays are the final year on cap on your revenue. It has been often seen that the black Friday to cyber monday are capable of making or breaking the entire fiscal revenue forecast of a business. The eComm players need to be innovative to succeed in this event where customers are looking for a healthy deal which suits them.
THE BEGINNING
The Halloween shopping kicked off this year’s winter commerce. The overall number of online sales do indicate that the christmas would definitely be merry for eComs. You know your numbers and you sure can compare them with last year’s. What did you get right? And, what you did not? Is your relative comparison ratio better, or lower? Well, these are the numbers you know. For the ones you do not, run Surveys. Who else knows better than your buyer about these details anyway?
Few Mistakes
Many users couldn’t relate with the offers and the Product combination packages. Few of them found better deals on other stores or perhaps the keywords were not optimized correctly for searching a particular product on your store. Some couldn’t find relevant products on your store. All these result in a low conversion ratio. The time is now to discover them, to rectify them.
Learn From Your Failures
You can always learn from the failures and give the customers something better while focusing on improvements. The first thing for improvement is to know your mistakes and next step is to transform your weakness into your strength as the shopping season has just started. You need to be prepared for your Christmas to be Merry.
DISCOUNT ON CART VALUE
Get 1+ Product in Cart!
The festive season is about heavy discounts, mouth watering offers and sales! The celebration is worth only if people feel they shopped at discounted rates and gained some freebies. During the November sale people look forward to buy gift cards & certificates, jewellery, books, electronic goods, candies, decorative goods. The season also kicks off the winter breeze and they look forward to buy all the winter accessories. Warm leather jackets and gum boots.
The Attractive Offers & Its Relevance
The users can be allured with some spooky make-over of the landing page which pops up the festive offers. Combos of two or three products can be clubbed together at a discounted rate fixed by you, which may include the most selling and the least selling product. Or let’s say, if the user buys from the same segment or brand and the bill goes beyond $100, the user gets a discount of 10%.
You can also look to provide direct coupon codes, using them the users can avail discounts or cashbacks upto certain margins. Offers for the first time users and some referral codes from friends too allow some discounts. All this requires automation and a tool which makes your work as a manager easy.
NEED FOR A LANGUAGE TRANSLATOR
A language translator is an extension tool which allows you to delimit complexities of cultural and geographical barriers. The Halloween and the entire winter festival is celebrated across almost all over the globe. But not all of those countries and their people speak the same tongue. For your eCommerce store to be earning more it needs to be serving all those people and it needs to translate the source language into the target language.
Reach More to Gain More!
Considering the second largest market of the world and the largest during the winter sale, the European Union itself has 27 countries and many of the member countries have more than one local languages. To target maximum number of people a language translation extension is a must for your store.
Impact of Compromises
Some online stores lack this feature and only the currencies are translated leaving the product description in english. This leaves the user frustrated and impacts the business negatively. Retailers make this mistake in the short sighted vision of saving some money. You shouldn’t overlook the fact that a complete translation can generate more revenue as it empowers you to take your stores services to more and more people and the better the chances of your ROI.
SCHEDULED DELIVERY & ORDER TRACKING
Something that gets ignored too often!
Managing a mammoth eComm traffic and the delivery of those products during a festive season is a serious task. The customers tend to become very choosy about the delivery date. You can let your customers to personalize their shipping dates, delivery dates using delivery date extension tools with which your users can format dates, time, national holidays, weekend days, time range, and can even comment delivery notes.
Delivery time & date is a user-oriented feature. It is really easy to use incorporated in the frontend. Customers can choose delivery date & time and they can also choose predefined comments that can cope up automatically. It is also planned easily after shipping method segment that brings the finest logic for customers.
This reduces the rejection rate that can occur when you allow the users to choose when they want delivery. The flexibility you provide your users will become your unique selling point. Your customers would love it because they wouldn’t be receiving calls from your delivery men, they would be allowed to track their orders seamlessly and all your resources would be utilized with maximum efficiency.
“How to make this year better?” is the critical question Product Managers are often encountered with.
There are no ready recknors in Digital space. You do the math based on the numbers your business produces. You take decisions based on that data available to you. Online Survey and post-season analysis are just as critical as the pre-season meetup to ascertain the strategy.
