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Analyzing Trends: 3 Ways to Prepare for Black Friday

Posted by Doug McLeanMobile/Tablets, Uncategorized

To be ready for Black Friday Cyber Monday this year, you need to optimize for your mobile shoppers.For retailers, holiday season preparations are in full swing, making now the time to look back at what happened last year and what it taught us. The top three key trends reported in the wake of Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2017 include:

  • Mobile devices accounted for 50% or more of transactions for the first time. These numbers varied depending on the source, but highlighted a statistical trend toward mobile.
  • The value of transactions during the BFCM period last year amounted to $13b – almost a 15% increase year-over-year. This is a hot market for retailers nimble enough to identify and meet consumer needs quickly.
  • For online retailers, there’s no longer two separate dates. BFCM is a four-day festival of shopping.

So, what are the implications of this as we all make inventory and promotion plans for 2018?

The first and perhaps the most actionable trend is the move to mobile devices by online shoppers. Retailers must have a mobile strategy that moves beyond just a responsive site. Retailers must optimize experiences for mobile shoppers using a mobile-first website or custom app. This may mean we’ll see more retailers move to Progressive Web Apps prior to BFCM. Yes, optimizing for mobile may make the PC-browser shopping experiences something of an afterthought. But, shoppers won’t be coming back to PCs, and there are now tools that minimize the development differences between the mobile and PC platforms.

To further endorse investing in mobile, remember that Google started moving to mobile-first indexing in March. So, from a pure SEO perspective, optimizing your sites for mobile users is just sensible.

The second issue that needs to be addressed is the gap between the growth in mobile shoppers and actual mobile transactions. Adobe reported that mobile devices made up 47% of online shopping visits but only 27% of purchases during the 2017 holiday shopping period.

The browser/buyer gap highlighted by Adobe indicates we still have a lot to learn about converting mobile shoppers, but there are some lessons from the desktop world that apply, just more so because of the screen-real-estate challenge. Getting your mobile search functionality right for the 2018 BFCM shopping season really matters.

With these trends in mind, how should a thoughtful practitioner prepare for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2018? SLI Systems’ Customer Success Managers spend every day looking at retail sites and have developed the following three recommendations for 2018.

  1. Omnichannel Retailers Should Optimize Local Search Behavior: Google reports 50% of consumers will visit a store within a day of doing a local search. The implications go beyond SEO strategy. You’ll want your search box to lead shoppers to compelling products and help them purchase either online or in store as quickly as possible. That means you want a search functionality that not only considers the shoppers’ search terms, but also their geo-location, season, and any other behavioral data available. Search results should include not only product options but store locations and local inventory availability when possible.
  2. Personalize Product Recommendations Based on User Device: Historical data indicates that iPhone users tend to spend an estimated 30% more than Android users per transaction. This allows merchandisers to set recommendation rules that either present higher priced (and more profitable) products OR present Android users with promotional discount options tuned to their likely purchase behavior.
  3. Split Your Shopper Analytics into Desktop and Mobile: Desktop/mobile aggregate analytics likely lead to merchandising decisions that serve neither audience very well. Much of the current behavioral data indicates that users (even the same users) do different things on their mobile and desktop devices. So, a mobile savvy merchandiser will evaluate the two audiences separately and look at how search terms, bounce rate, cart abandons and other key metrics affect conversion and average order value. If your current analytics tools aren’t capable of providing this degree of granularity, it’s time to look for new tools.

One final point on the trends we saw last year. Because the BFCM shopping season is no longer two discrete shopping days but a four-day window in which promotions will either succeed or fail, world-class merchandisers are placing more emphasis on monitoring shopper behavior as it happens and adapting pricing and promotions as necessary.

Without extremely robust reporting and merchandising tools, you may find yourself in a position of not “seeing” what’s happening on your store until it’s too late to respond in any meaningful way.

For more on how to be ready for BFCM, check out our e-book E-commerce Merchandising: The Ultimate Guide to the Newest Techniques.

Master 2015 Holiday Trends to Clinch 2016 Holiday Sales

Posted by Chris Brubaker, Chief Marketing OfficereCommerce, Mobile/Tablets, SEO, Site Search, Site Search Tips, Uncategorized

tipsEvery year it seems like just as we start settling into the summer haze, holiday planning kicks into high gear! Since 31.5% of the $343 billion transacted online occurred in the fourth quarter last year (U.S Commerce Dept), smart retailers can’t afford to nap (for too long) in that beach chair. If those numbers don’t get you on your feet, take this in. During the 2015 holiday season:

  • Non-store sales (mostly online) grew 9%, compared to 1.9% in-store sales growth (NRF)
  • Sales from desktop surpassed $1 billion on 16 days during Holiday 2015 (Comscore)
  • The average transaction size via desktop was higher than mobile and in-store. More than half of consumers increased the amount of shopping they did online this year (NRF)

It’s no time to panic though. You’re right on time. Instead, let’s reflect on key trends from 2015 to ease back into and clinch holiday sales this year:

#1. Consumers actively shop online on Thanksgiving Day (and earlier that week).

This is no longer in question (or taboo). In 2015, online sales increased 21% over Thanksgiving 2014 (IBM). For perspective, this is 58% over the 2012 holiday. On Thanksgiving 2015, AOV was $123 (surprisingly on par with Cyber Monday) and estimated web sales were $1.73 billion (Adobe). Other top revenue days to keep in mind this season include (Custora):

  • Cyber Monday: 6.3% of holiday revenue, $3.07 billion in web sales
  • Black Friday:2% of holiday revenue, $2.74 billion in web sales
  • Sun, Nov 29 (3%), Sat, Nov 28 (2.8%), Tue, Nov 24 (2.7%) and Wed, Nov 25 (2.2%)

PRO TIP: Arm your site with strong promotions early in the holiday season. Last year, Amazon offered Black Friday deals an entire week early. Macys.com Black Friday deals started the day before Thanksgiving, and Walmart.com followed suit offering deals early on Thanksgiving Day. U.S. consumers made 47% of their online purchases by the end of Cyber Monday (Comscore).

#2. Consumers shop heavily on their mobile devices.

While we all know this at this point, the numbers really drive the message home. During the 2015 holiday season, U.S. mobile sales increased 59% to $12.65 billion, which is 18% of U.S. holiday e-commerce sales; and mobile traffic exceeded desktop traffic every day during the season (Comscore). What’s more, based on research from 8,000 brands and 35,000 e-commerce shops, IBM found 31% of Nov/Dec web sales occurred on mobile.

PRO TIP: If they can’t find it, they can’t buy it. Given the space and speed challenges of smartphones, a prominent search box can be the best gateway to quickly finding and buying products on mobile sites and apps. The most important site search feature is relevance. If you provide relevant and fast search results, visitors are more likely to find what they’re looking for and make a purchase (e.g. push the most popular results for a search term to the top of the list).

#3. Consumers are coming to and buying from your site via Search.

Search brought in 29% of retailers’ online sales during the 2015 holiday season, second only to Affiliates (Adobe). Other acquisition methods include Direct (22%), Email (15%) Display (2.5%) and Social (1.4%). What’s more, 56% of searches were conducted on a smartphone or tablet during the 2015 holidays (NRF). Fortunately, if your site meets the following five criteria, you have an excellent starting point to succeed with your search engine rankings:

  1. Your products and content are relevant to the search phrases shoppers actually use
  2. Your site is mobile-friendly
  3. Many highly credible sites link to yours
  4. Your page load times are sufficient
  5. You score well in engagement signals such as bounce rate, time on site, and pages visited per session

PRO TIP: It’s no secret that Amazon wins broad keyword searches. It’s imperative to understand the importance of more specific keyword searches, called long-tail terms. While 70% of search traffic is long tail, most retailers just focus on the top 10-20% of keywords. To find these valuable long-tail terms, review your top site search terms, map these keywords to the products you sell, and then create keyword-optimized landing pages. Shoppers who find your site via long-tail search terms are more likely to find and buy exactly what they want.

Now that you’ve eased back into holiday planning and mastered just three (of many!) takeaways from the 2015 season, here’s some more good news: there are two more shopping days this year between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. That’s 48 more hours of opportunities to provide your customers with amazing, personalized online customer experiences to clinch 2016 holiday sales. So recline (for a bit longer), start planning, and enjoy the last few days of summer!

For more tips, check out our guides to Site Search and the Mobile Experience and How to Get the SEO-Driven Revenue You’re Missing.

Black Friday’s 2015 E-commerce Shift

Posted by Tim CallaneCommerce, Infographic, Site Search, Site Search Tips

As the biggest shopping week of the holiday season draws to an end, the numbers are in. Exceeding analyst forecasts across the board, e-commerce sales soared, increasing 15%-16% due to sharp spikes on both Black Friday – traditionally a brick-and-mortar event – and Cyber Monday. In fact, Cyber Monday 2015 set a record as the biggest online sales day EVER, bringing in $3.07 billion!

Thanksgiving Weekend Shopping Peaks 2015Curious to see how search query volume stacked up this year, SLI analyzed more than 340 million queries across 500+ North American online stores. We are thankful to report that people were still mostly focused on family and food this Thanksgiving, as this Turkey Day (and the following Saturday) brought in the least amount of online activity during the 2015 Thanksgiving-to-Cyber Monday holiday timeframe. Family time FTW!

Of course all bets are off once folks wake up on Black Friday. Aligned with the day’s online sales surge, SLI data showed that Black Friday is spilling into the e-commerce world in a big way! While Cyber Monday still experienced the most online activity – nearly double that of Thanksgiving – SLI found Cyber Monday only brought in 11% more activity than new online heavy-hitter Black Friday.

According to the NRF, nearly 102 million people say they shopped in stores on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, BUT more than 103 million say they shopped online during this two-day stretch. Internet Retailer reported that “e-commerce accounted for $822 million spent in the first 11 hours of Black Friday, and discounts were mounting as online retailers jockeyed for position.” Ultimately, shoppers spent a whopping $2.72 billion online during Black Friday (14% more than in 2014).

In addition, much like our 2014 holiday study, night owls are consistently e-retailers’ most active shoppers. The peak online shopping hour was Cyber Monday at 10:00 p.m. EST. On Thanksgiving Day, the peak shopping hour was also 10:00 p.m. EST. Year-over-year, the exception has been Black Friday with a peak shopping hour of 12:00 Noon EST.

For e-commerce retailers, being ready for these shifting trends in peak days and hours is crucial to ensure they can reach their buyers and avoid site stress. This year Neiman Marcus, Target, and PayPal suffered extended outages that negatively impacted both sales and customer loyalty. Based on this year’s performance, we expect Black Friday to be neck-and-neck with Cyber Monday in 2016. Make sure your site is ready for this surge, and don’t forget to time-critical promotions for all those late-night shoppers out there.

For a 30-minute course on how better site search can keep your shoppers happy (and spending) through the rest of the holiday season and beyond, see our latest video presentation, Best Practices for E-commerce Site Search.

A Surge in Query Volume is Coming

Posted by Shaun RyaneCommerce, Site Search

black-friday-rushThis morning (when I was supposed to be sleeping, but wasn’t because of jet lag), Flipboard popped up an article about Google’s scale that mentioned Google serves 1.2 trillion searches per year. That’s a lot! In the last year, SLI served over 15 billion searches across our more than 1,000 customer sites, which is about an 80th of what Google reportedly served. Given these numbers, I’m sure that across the web the number of searches within websites is higher than the number of searches on Google, Bing and the other web search engines.

With Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up, SLI expects to serve more searches in the next seven days than any other week of the year. Thanksgiving is very much an American holiday, but the retail events surrounding it have become an international phenomenon. Retailers around the world take advantage of the opportunity to boost their holiday programs. Last year we saw large query volumes from our Brazilian retailer customers. UK retailers are jumping on the trend with £1.9 billion forecast to be sold in Black Friday sales.

The SLI team has been working to ensure we have plenty of capacity to meet the peak query volumes across the more than 1,000 sites that we power. In measuring search activity during Thanksgiving weekend last year, we found the highest day during this surge in shopping resulted in about 2.7x the normal number of queries. But the real peak is when the sales first open, the emails are sent and people rush to get the best deals. During a recent pre-Black Friday sale we saw the per-minute query volumes hit 200x their normal level.

Especially at this time of year, it’s vital that retailers’ infrastructure is ready to handle these peaks. SLI customers can rest assured: we are ready and waiting.

E-commerce Search Queries Hit New High Thanksgiving Weekend

Posted by Tim CallaneCommerce, Site Search

As 2014 holiday shopping statistics roll in, SLI Systems found some interesting trends among search query data for the 800+ e-commerce sites it serves. In addition to seeing a record-breaking Cyber Monday, we identified the weekend’s peak U.S. shopping times, discovered that 40% of weekend shopping was done from mobile devices, saw huge international growth in Black Friday shopping, and hit a new milestone with the number of search queries SLI served.

PeakHolidayShopping_2014Late-Night Shoppers Prevail

Overall, it’s clear that holiday e-commerce shopping is up significantly from last year – The Custora E-Commerce Pulse reported an increase of 15.4% in e-commerce revenue for the holiday weekend (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) over the same weekend in 2013. As mentioned in an SLI press release issued today, 10 p.m. EST on Cyber Monday was the peak hour for online shopping in the U.S. Thanksgiving Day shopping also peaked at 10 p.m. EST.

Mobile Monday?

SLI research also found that 37% of Cyber Monday shopping in the U.S. was conducted on mobile devices – this is up from the 29% reported by Marketing Land in 2013. As the percentage of mobile shopping continues to rise – and the term “cyber” becomes more dated (“Cyber Monday” was first coined by Shop.org in 2005 to describe the online shopping peak on the Monday after Black Friday) – this $2 billion shopping day may be on its way toward the new name of “Mobile Monday.”

Black Friday Now a Global Event

While the chart above looks at peak U.S. shopping times, our data surprisingly showed a significant amount of Black Friday traffic coming from Brazil and the UK. Even though these countries don’t celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday that Americans enjoy on the fourth Thursday and Friday of November, retailers have launched Black Friday campaigns in Brazil and the UK to capitalize on the U.S. shopping trend. Amazon was the first to offer Black Friday discounts in the UK in 2000, and clearly, the trend has skyrocketed.

Record Queries Served by SLI

Due to the international growth of Black Friday shopping and online shopping in general, SLI also hit a new record of serving more than 100 million site-search queries in a single day. There are many ways we prepare for supporting our clients’ peak shopping days – from the highly redundant and scalable cloud architecture we offer year-round to the additional site optimizations our engineers conduct well in advance of expected peaks. We’re pleased to be able to support the increased search traffic on any of our clients’ sites, no matter what day of the year.

SaaS Based Site Search Offers Reliability During Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Posted by geoffbeCommerce, Navigation, Site Search

Imagine getting your online storefront ready for holiday shoppers during the lucrative Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days and beyond, only to have the entire eCommerce experience shut down due to traffic surges or server problems. The last thing you want your eager buyers to encounter is an error message or a painfully slow shopping experience.

For popular components of your website, like search and navigation, choosing properly hosted solutions can help you avoid failure exactly at the time when you need the highest performance and availability. With eCommerce experts predicting that online spending will increase about 15% in November and December – a total of $61.8 billion – you want to ensure your site is performing at its best during this time.

SaaS based solutions offer far better redundancy than many eCommerce businesses can build in-house. An infrastructure that hosts client sites on multiple servers in multiple data centers, in geographically separated locations, means the site will remain operational even if there is a problem. It’s the smart way to handle spikes in traffic or unexpected outages that could disappoint customers and cause a significant loss of revenue.

The type of highly redundant system described above can help meet many challenges – everything from a hurricane knocking servers offline to unprecedented crowds of shoppers overwhelming your website on Cyber Monday.

At SLI, we use multiple servers in each of our eight data centers in locations around the world to host our client sites, and we make sure to only use a fraction of the capacity of these servers at any given time. In this way, if a disruption occurs, our customers are assured of uptime. If you have questions about bringing greater redundancy to your eCommerce site, ask us by emailing discovery@sli-systems.com.

 

Cyber Monday Revenues of $1.465 Billion Top Black Friday Sales

Posted by Terry CostaeCommerce, Mobile/Tablets

While we were impressed with Black Friday’s online sales, we were blown away by the revenues generated the following Monday. The biggest Cyber Monday on record saw exceptionally strong sales, with revenues topping $1.465 Billion – up 17 percent from last year and exceeding Black Friday sales. The weekend between the two big shopping days was also hot – bringing in over $1.1 Billion from weekend shoppers.

As with Black Friday, Cyber Monday also saw a huge focus on mobile – as shoppers pulled out their phones and tablets to aid their shopping. Cyber Monday saw an increase in purchases from iPhones over other smartphones or the iPad. These statistics from TabletCrunch show updated mobile numbers based on Cyber Monday sales.

  • Mobile Traffic: 22.4 percent of consumers use a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site
  • Mobile Shopping: 12 percent of consumers use their mobile device to make a purchase
  • The Multi-Screen shopper: The iPhone is driving more retail shopping than any other device with traffic reaching 8.7 percent versus 7.2 percent and 6.3 percent for iPad and Android respectively

Much of the increase around the holidays this year was based around early discounts and deals specifically targeted to online shoppers. Shoppers are increasingly turning to online shopping for around-the-clock shopping convenience, lack of crowds, easy price comparisons and free shipping offers.

As online retail continues to grow, the space is becoming more competitive and finding ways to set your eCommerce site apart from others is essential. Luckily the steps to doing so are not as hard as you’d think – there are simple ways to improve your site that yield great returns. We’ve highlighted a lot of these in previous blogs.

We experienced the impact of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush from our clients firsthand, as we saw huge spikes in traffic on our clients’ websites – they more than doubled on Black Friday and increased by 50 percent on Cyber Monday. Interestingly, some of our data shows that Black Friday traffic was helped by shoppers in Brazil, who also jumped online to take advantage of holiday sales.

These major shopping events remind us how our work can mean the difference between a sale and a loss. We provide our clients with peace of mind that our service won’t go down during peak holiday traffic – our servers are “over-optimized” to handle massive spikes in search traffic, as well as natural disasters and other unforeseen issues.

As shoppers become more savvy and continue to reach for their laptop or mobile device from around the globe when they want to make a purchase, make sure you’re in the best possible position to lead customers to the products they want.