Will Consumers Keep Standing in Line, When They Can Be Online?
Black Friday used to mean waking up in the middle of the night, getting in your car and waiting outside... in the cold for stores like Best Buy to open. It was the only way to get 50% off that new television. If you weren’t one of the first 100 people, you would miss out on the video game your kids begged for, but the times they are a changing.Now Black Friday exists guess where? Online. The shopping that was previously reserved for Cyber Monday now happens at the same time some of us are still sitting in our cars waiting. This year on Black Friday online sales jumped 23.6% from a year ago, adding up to $6.22 billion in sales just online. Consumers bought everything from clothes to flat-screen TVs at great prices right from their screens.Basically, even on the biggest shopping day of the year, more and more people were doing their holiday shopping from their couches rather than actually in stores. This year’s Black Friday will come incredibly close to eclipsing last year’s Cyber Monday sales. Is there any end to how much purchasing will be done online and how much retail will continue to take the hit.With Millennials doing most of the spending and Gen Z coming into their power, the answer should terrify retailers and inspire brands to make sure that they really know what they are doing when it comes to ecomm. It is not enough to just be there.Brands need a serious, well-crafted digital/ecomm strategy. And that needs to include mobile.Brand with a better mobile experience for customers turned nearly 10% more smartphone visitors into buyers this Black Friday than last year.You need a brilliant digital strategy that leads people to purchase on the web instead of in a store. The first step is having a solid social media presence, which means paying to boost almost every post. Instagram targeting works so well that I often find myself clicking on ads wondering how Instagram knew I needed a pair of shoes like that even though I consciously did not know I needed them. By promoting your products there, consumers can find and buy them without even looking.While Instagram can get consumers to see your product, you also have to have a website that looks good and works well on a mobile browser. If a consumer clicks on the product, but then can’t easily buy it on their phone, there is basically a zero percent chance they will go look for later on a computer or in a store. The same thing goes for selling on Amazon. It is its own ecosystem with its own rules, that having an expert to help you navigate can really help. You can read more here about how we can help you can take advantage of all of the features Amazon has to offer. It will also be important this holiday season as Amazon sold one million toys and 700,000 fashion items in just the first nine hours of business on Black Friday. Especially for a late shopper like me, Amazon Prime’s two-day shipping cannot be beat.E-commerce is still on the rise and it’s already exploded this holiday season. Don’t let your brand’s digital strategy hold you back, we can help.