Three Tips for Holiday Retailers
Ecommerce businesses have come to view the holiday season as a crucial element of their recurring revenue. The good news is that the traditional holiday season is expanding, with Amazon, Walmart, Target and other big retailers holding October sales events and offering deep discounts to entice consumers to start their holiday shopping early. A Shopkick survey of more than 6,000 US. consumers indicated that 38% of consumers start their holiday shopping season before Halloween, and another 44% before Thanksgiving. A mere 15% of consumers plan to wait until December to begin their holiday shopping.
The trend toward earlier holiday shopping has necessitated earlier preparation of inventory – in fact, some online retailers began to prepare in June. If you haven’t already started, don’t panic! September is your chance to do everything you need to prepare your inventory, and set up your systems to handle fulfillment and returns. There’s still time to pull everything together and ensure that you optimize your holiday season.
Let Your Data Lead the Way
Seth David of Nerd Enterprises recently sat down with John May of Webgility’s Customer Engagement Team to discuss how ecommerce businesses can keep Calm in the Chaos leading up to the holiday season.
As an online retailer, your first priority should be to establish your holiday catalog. One of Seth and John’s first recommendations was to make sure you have a solid understanding of which products are your top performers. Use historical data to see which products bring the most revenue, and to create sales forecasts for the coming season. One of the more popular systems of inventory management is called ABC Analysis – Category A is top sellers, Category B doesn’t sell as much, but you still need to keep it in stock, and Category C is a low performer.
Second, review your storage limits, check your current inventory levels and place orders. Take advantage of this process to make sure that you don’t have any dead stock or out of stock items talking up precious space.
Next, ship all of your holiday inventory to your 3rd Party Logistics (3PL) partners, well I advance of their deadlines (more on that below). Allow yourself enough time to review shipping costs and carrier deadlines, and explore shipping promos. Also, be sure to clearly list your cut-off dates on your ecommerce channels to help manage customer expectations.
Mark Your Calendar Well in Advance
The Cyber Five, (Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Sunday and Cyber Monday), have become a huge driver of holiday revenue, accounting for 16.2% of total US holiday retail ecommerce sales in 2023. In fact, Cyber Monday was the biggest online shopping day of the year, with revenue figures hitting about $12 billion in the US.
That said, here are a few key dates to be aware of leading up to the 2024 holiday shopping season:
Three Webgility Tips for Success
According to a recent report from the National Retail Federation (NRF), total returns in the retail industry amounted to $743 billion in 2023, representing 14.5% of sales. Online returns were even higher, at 17.6% versus 10.2% for brick & mortar businesses. In 2024, return rates will likely rise as high as 20-35% for a few weeks after the holidays into 2024. Put the operations in place to manage returns, and also utilize them as an opportunity to interact with customers by making it easier to return and buy new merchandise.
Are you looking for a better way to automate your inventory management across multiple ecommerce channels? Sign up for free trial of Webgility today.