I wrote about the shopping event Black Friday at Freeport, which funny enough, despite how successful it might have been was connected to Halloween instead of Thanksgiving in my previous article Cyber Monday Comes After Black Friday. This year, I received a new invitation, and just as last year, they had decided to plan the event one month earlier than the traditional Black Friday. Perhaps they will go for another event in the end of November. Several e-retailers choose to have Halloween offers, such as a home electronics chain store that had scary low prices.
Cyber Monday, the digital version of the large shopping day Black Friday, takes place on December 1 this year. The same day as several e-retailers starts their digital Christmas calendar with offers every day until Christmas. There are probably a lot of us that have been raised with the real Advent calendars or Christmas calendars as children. They have looked a bit different, and today there are more variants than ever, both to children and grown-ups. When I was young, there were calendars with chocolate, that wasn’t really tasty, and my mum wrapped 24 little parcels. And I bounced up every morning to open it.
You can in the same way with an interesting and eventful digital calendar get the customers to engage. Just face it, a lot of us like a good deal, especially when it doesn't involve getting in a line in a crowd with others in a physical store. And when it is time to shop Christmas gifts to everyone. It is not unlikely that more things will be ordered at the same time, or several orders if more offers are appealing. A customer who is happy with the order from today’s offer will most likely check out the web site more days during December, and is happy to spread the word where you can make a great bargain.
And as always, there is the question about free delivery or not. If it is sometime of the year that you should offer free delivery, it might just be for Christmas shopping when billions are used in Sweden. It is generally an increase of turnover, but perform analysis and calculate to find out what is optimal for your business. And don’t forget to be clear about last day to order for deliveries before Christmas Eve, delivery fees, and conditions for returns and exchanges. I saw some that offered free delivery until a certain time, for example the middle of December last year. I read about some at Facebook that wrote that it is not of people that hesitate to take the car to the shopping mall, but when you see a delivery fee of SEK 49 in a web store, it doesn’t seem reasonable all of a sudden. I personally think that a smaller deliver fee is ok if it is delivered to my mail box. If I need to go to the service point, I might as well choose the free delivery to the store if it is available, and collect it when I am in the city.
Some e-retailers choose to let the customers know what offers to expect on certain days, and some want to get more visitors to the store by making them visit the web store on a daily basis. But then you have the risk of them forgetting to stop by. There are also different tactics to spread the offers. I heard last year several who was complaining that it is not ok to receive e-mails every day with offers from the Christmas calendar when you have agreed to a regular newsletter, since it ended up with a lot of e-mails, especially if get from several e-retailers. Some, like CDON.com, let you register for a special newsletter if you wanted to receive these e-mails every day. You can then actively by yourself choose if you want the information or not. Then there is always Facebook that is flooded with offers from retailers who want our Christmas money.
After a quick search, you can find that there are several who offer digital calendars that can easily be adapted to your own web store. You can of course develop it yourself, or let someone do an exclusive one, and make it just as advanced as you like. It is quite good enough to promote it on the start page, and then link it to the product/category list page where today’s offers are gathered. But just as when you were little, it is the content that is the most important. It can be nice to have a mix of products that needs to be cleared out of the warehouse anyways, things that are attractive and popular among the customers that will give a positive customer feeling, an incitement to buy more, for example buy 3 products and get 20 % off.
You can also consider to divide the offers in a way to even out the load on logistics for December, which is the most hectic month for e-retailers. And that is understandable in all sorts of ways. Last year, I shopped almost every Christmas gifts online. When everyone visits the physical stores at the same time, and you can hardly find a parking spot at the local shopping centre, e-commerce is more appealing than ever.
