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How To: Stay 1 step ahead of the online holiday shopping crunch
Matthieu Blandineau, product marketing manager, Algolia, offers up nine tips to stay ahead of the hectic holiday season all year round.
September 10, 2019
By Matthieu Blandineau, product marketing manager, Algolia
Black Friday is often called "the biggest shopping day of the year," a day when millions of shoppers congregate online to locate the best and brightest deals. Black Friday 2018 did not disappoint, pulling in $6.22 billion in online sales — up 23.6% from 2017 and setting "a new high," according to Adobe Analytics. The Friday after Thanksgiving 2018 was also the first day in history to see more than $2 billion in sales come from smartphones.
The holiday season, particularly Black Friday and Cyber Monday, lure millions of shoppers to retailers' websites and mobile apps, generating spikes in customer visits and number of searches performed on these digital properties. In 2018, Algolia ecommerce customers in North America saw a 23% increase in search traffic on Black Friday, as well as a 28% increase on Cyber Monday. While the holiday season is often considered the peak of online sales surges, there are other days on the calendar that are generating massive digital crowds. In 2018, Algolia customers saw a 20% increase in search traffic on Martin Luther King weekend, 10% on Memorial Day, and 15% on the Fourth of July.
As retailers see increased digital crowds, many also see their sites crashing or malfunctioning. Some retailers, including some of the most established, faced retail horror stories of their own. Whether websites simply crashed (Lululemon, Lowe's), started queuing shoppers (Debenhams), or weren't able to process checkouts, high-traffic didn't mean high sales for all retailers. Especially interesting for us, scivisum.co.uk reported search specific failures for some retailers, including: "Search results stalling or returning incorrect options." While some of those problems were caused by the search system's inability to handle the search traffic load, others were more subtle. A lot of shoppers saw products that were out of stock, meaning the underlying system couldn't keep up with constant inventory changes.
How then can companies avoid online pitfalls and prepare for busy digital shopping days? Here are nine tips to stay one step ahead:
1. Prepare e-commerce systems to handle the charge
While your competitors are spending just as much money and effort in acquiring new shoppers, McKinsey & Company says that a user will abandon a bad site for a competitor after two to three seconds. Any outage or even slowdown on your digital properties can re-route shoppers from your store and cost you revenue. And that doesn't even factor in negative publicity. Whether companies handle their own search infrastructure or trust a third-party provider for their various services and technologies, staying ahead of the competition means making sure systems are ready for load spikes that come during critical shopping days.
2. Keep inventory up to date
While creating scarcity is a powerful strategy to accelerate a purchase decision, showing products that simply can't be checked out will cause users to bounce. It also wastes screen real estate for products that won't generate any sales.Companies should ensure that products displayed on their homepage, in recommendations or in searches, are in-stock and available to ship by the holiday. Considering the volume and frequency of transactions during the holiday season, it sometimes means millions of updates to the product database every day. Every system needs to pick up on these changes to keep inventory accurate, which requires a large-scale, agile system.
3. Double down on the mobile experience…
According to Adobe, mobile devices accounted for 51% of all traffic and 31% of revenue between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday 2018.From landing pages to payment, the mobile shopping experience should not be an afterthought. Building mobile experiences means much more than having a responsive website. For instance, many difficulties on the mobile platform stem from a extreme limitation of display space. A common mistake is wanting to display all of the data at hand as one would on a desktop. Companies must aim to understand how their shoppers browse for products on their phones vs. on the desktop. For items that are selected visually — like shoes or clothes — update a mobile website or app in advance by presenting search results as enlarged pictures to help improve the mobile user experience.
4. …For your "brick-and-mortar" sales as well
As Bazaarvoice puts it in their top five consumer-driven trends in retail report, 45% of shoppers now report reading reviews before purchasing products in brick-and-mortar locations. Chances are they will search for those reviews on mobile. Thus, the mobile experience should be optimized for this "research online, purchase offline" use case, by displaying first results available in nearby stores for instance.
5. Leverage social content
More than half (57%) of online shoppers have purchased a product they heard about on social media, and in 2017, conversion lift among consumers interacting with visual content reached 111%. Companies should take advantage of public content, such as reviews, blog posts and shopping guides, by posting them directly on their sites. And if they don't have first party content on hand, using consumer-generated content from social media platforms should perform at least as well. This can be shown alongside product pages and search results to help inform and influence shoppers' purchasing decisions.
6. Anticipate shoppers' wishes
A company's inventory is one of its greatest assets, and it should align with customers' needs. Search analytics can be used to discover what articles shoppers are searching for ahead of the holiday season and, more importantly, what they are searching for but not finding. These insights can be used to adapt the catalog, plan deals or improve the advertising and SEO strategy.
7. Don't just analyze purchases — analyze search!
Companies can learn a lot about their customers by examining what they search for. Through these insights, customers communicate a wide range of information, including how well the searches converted, navigation patterns and popular brands searched. This data is key to improving the customer experience and seeing better results year-round.
8. Be flexible with merchandising
Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, online stores provide the luxury of reorganizing the merchandise in one click — or even automatically. Shoppers will look for the best deals, so allow them to rank results by best discount rate. You can create strategic scarcity by ranking first the products with limited sales time. If there is a door buster offer, rank this door buster first for relevant queries and then prioritize products with the higher margins. The important thing is to be able to configure the ranking logic of search according to what matters to the shoppers — and to the business.
9. Turn first-time holiday shoppers into engaged customers
Throughout the holiday season and special days all year long, companies will acquire new shoppers, thanks to unmatched offers on specific products and increased advertising efforts. And — if they executed well on the above tips — chances are those consumers will like the overall experience and return to the store during other points in the year.
It's never too early for teams to reflect on what went well (and what did not) and start planning ahead for the next big sales days and once again capitalize on the shopping rush. Search, for example, has moved far beyond the search box, to include advanced features such as navigation and personalization. The logical next step is "search without the box." Shoppers are getting more and more familiar with advanced UIs such as voice and chatbots, and will expect to find their favorite products through those interfaces. Search is a strategic marketing and merchandising tool that can have a huge impact on a retailer's bottom line — for better or for worse. Getting search right — during the holidays and year-round — is crucial.
