Upcoming Black Friday (Cyber Monday) – Equipped with an eCommerce infrastructure?
Geared up for Christmas holiday season? Or wait, let’s talk about the Black Friday aka Cyber Monday.
Are you a retailer trying to get ready for the 2018 holiday season? Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you.
We know how hard it is for a retailer to withstand competition and maintain sales. So, we have got a perfect checklist where all standard e-commerce skills you need to work on.
Some of the areas where you need to focus on:
1. Inventory Management/Monitoring 2. Load testing 3. Mobile site optimization 4. Email drip campaigns 5. Customer Service 6. Digital Marketing Campaigns 7. Email Marketing 8. Security
You got these skills? trust me, you are all set for the e-commerce future!
I’m sure everyone is looking forward to the Black Friday. How can you prepare your e-commerce business in a month’s time?
As you know, the door buster sales is the prime strategy for any Black Friday weekend. But if you are looking for more (long-term), you got to think deeper like promotions or new features. Ensure that your e-commerce solution is the best for delivering the best user experience as e-commerce businesses are growing at a rapid pace.
How confident are you with your e-commerce platform? Don’t worry! Checkout the 3 major insights on channels, development and of course, data that will help you gear up for the future!
#1. Strength of Omnichannel in e-commerce
Similarly you have been hearing a lot about omnichannel as it is one of the mostly discussed keyword in ecommerce. Shopaholics no longer purchase via one point of sale these days. The customer journey has got multiple touch points that starts with in store and movies towards marketplace website that can be accessed via mobile app and also on desktop browsers.
Therefore, it is very important for e-commerce retails to offer the best web experience for customers so that users can get the best out of the brand consistently.
However, the fact is various companies struggle by offering this web experience. The reason is because there isn’t a single source of truthfulness for the data, customer information, inventory, web traffic, marketing metrics or even user experience.
Let’s take an example of running a webstore which doesn’t share information with the Amazon/eBay marketplace storefront or physical locations. If the online store runs out of its stock on Cyber Monday, the site won’t be taking more orders. In parallel, the warehouses of the physical store miles away will be having relevant stocks which is ready to be shipped.
Having said, we strongly believe in omnichannel to have customization. It needs a flexible platform which doesn’t malfunction when trying to bring in loyalty programs or other campaigns like in store pickup. Retailers should have a holistic view of data across the channels. A perfect e-ecommerce platform will have a centralized area for monitoring order details, shipping information and inventory.
This is where we have x2x eCommerce as a perfect suite to help you work on inventory management, sales data and of course, customer information without any hassle.
#2. Continuous Improvement Allows for Flexibility
The Amazon’s development team has worked on a new code to production where the average rate is 11.6 seconds. What does this actually mean? It means that the Amazon team is building latest functionalities everytime to improve existing features, functionality, bug fixings to ensure that the customers are getting the best shopping experience. Now you know why Amazon is one of the leaders in e-commerce platform.
Now, folks like us are getting ready for the future. We need to ensure that our organizations can adapt to such technology driven development. It is recommended to work on small codes frequently with ongoing integration mechanisms that can help the development teams to focus on writing better codes, shipping capabilities and customer experience responses without any trouble.
3. The “Real-time” data
If your webstore doesn’t have real time data/not connected with data in real time, you are in big trouble.
Speaking about Cyber Monday and seasonal shopping, you don’t have a micro-second to lose! You will expect lot of incoming traffic, sales and support queries and stock related information every second. Inventory Management and pricing strategy is the key and without real-time data, your webstore is hopelessly bungled as you need to wait for long for your systems to generate requests overnight.
Thanks to solutions like x2x eCommerce, it helps you to update inventory and pricing within minutes. Also, with algorithmic real time data, webstores can easily spot the trends when the promotion goes on. Trends can help you to predict behavior and make important decisions for better shopping experience that will lead to better sales conversions.
Conclusion
Similarly, you need to work hard to get through Black Monday and Christmas holidays. All you need to do is follow the above table items. Once you have recovered from the regular short-term promotions, start working on your long-term accomplishment plans.
Likewise, you got to rethink the development procedures. Ensure that it is flexible and has scope for ongoing improvement. Also, maintain real-time dialogue with shoppers.
Well, that’s all from our side. Wishing you a great holiday season and success. When the rush is over, take a deep breath, analyze on your webstore performance and speak to yourself: Will my e-commerce store fetch results where the market will stay in the following year, 5 years down the line and further. If you aren’t happy about your webstore path, this is the right time for you to start with the process of making changes to your webstore.
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