Published: 09 Oct 2019
How to Avoid Black Friday Pitfalls?
Last Updated: 30 Dec 2022
Contents 1. What is Black Friday and Cyber Monday? 2. Important facts about Black Friday 3. Best Strategies to avoid Black Friday pitfalls 4. What are the strategies to become successful for e-commerce retailers during the Black Friday sales? 5. Conclusion
What is Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent the two largest online selling days in the year, mapping huge sales around the world. TechCrunch reports Black Friday racks up $5.03B in online sales, and $2B in mobile alone during 2017, while during 2018 the sales hit $6.2B in the US alone, with smartphones accounted for about $2.1B.
These whopping figures keep you surprised. However, it is true that Black Friday & Cyber Monday generates the highest business for retailers. It is essential for businesses to be up and running seamlessly during this peak load time (extended weekend sales).
In the US, Canada, UK, and Europe, online shoppers are quick buyers on Black Friday sales. There is a popular myth around this Black Friday, which states “Black Friday” described how retail stores spent most of the year “in the red” on their balance sheets. Thus, the holiday shopping season, beginning on the Friday after Thanksgiving, put them back into the “black”. Hence, Black Friday.
Some important facts about Black Friday worth a read:
– Tech Radar: Cyber Monday has become more popular than any other online shopping day in the US, Revenue estimates a year ago reached $7.9 billion in the US. It topped every other shopping day ever online, according to Adobe Analytics. Online stores should plan a smooth shopping week for customers. BlackFriday.com predicts that 2019 Black Friday online spending will surpass $12 billion this year. Of the shoppers they surveyed, 61% plan to do most of their holiday shopping online.
Hence, it is inevitable for online stores and e-commerce businesses to work on apps and websites to deliver a smooth shopping experience. Now is the time to get ready and prepare your application for the anticipated crowds and ensure that your application won’t fail on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Best Strategies to avoid Black Friday pitfalls
Under unprecedented high volumes of traffic on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, many e-commerce websites crashed in recent years, causing damage to their brand reputation and incurred immense losses.
1. Check out Speed Optimization and UX Viability:
Primarily it is crucial for e-commerce sites to have optimal page loading speed to ensure the shopper stays for good amount of time browsing their products.
Secondly, all online store apps should have a user interface that provides great User Experience (UX). These two features play a vital role for online shoppers to be engaged. To achieve an optimal loading time, the applications should be Load tested end-to-end. And for a great UX, usability testing should be taken up necessarily.
2. Research upon browsing Trends and Maintain Checklists:
It is essential to perform research on the trends that are most likely to hit the shopper in the sale season and subsequently maintain them with lucrative offers.
Such shopper’s analytics will help in enabling successful closures by online shoppers. Physical and online stores should be well aware of the trends for electronics, apparel, footwear, toys, media, cosmetics or household appliances and try to take complete advantage of data
3. Ensure Security Measures:
All online sites should necessarily use HTTPS to ensure full site-wide encryption. Full HTTPS is a mandate for all shopping (transaction) sites. Secured transactions are utmost required, as online shoppers want to safeguard their critical personal information. Moreover, online transactions should also be encrypted to ensure secure transactions for which Integration testing of the apps must be followed.
4. Opt for virtual Load Tests:
A load test should be performed ahead of time to ensure there are no last-minute surprises. To overcome this surge in traffic, appropriate Load testing should be performed to achieve the desired scalability levels so that users remain unaffected. During Black Friday sales, almost all online stores face massive incoming traffic, which has to be monitored ahead of time to make the website and application stable.
5. Check End-to-end Site Performance:
It is also essential to test the entire application end-to-end when once it is ready for the public. This sort of performance testing ensures that the site is working well even when numerous users access it at the same time. In the earlier years, many apps have crashed as they were not scalable enough to handle massive traffic during this holiday season, as apps received more number of end users accessing them across the globe.
6. Ensure to Adopt Web Usability Testing:
Customers wish to navigate and make numerous actions on the application and sometimes, they might not be able to find the correct links. This sort of poor usability deeply affects the users especially on a holiday sale with so many offers on the go. Hence, it is essential to have proper Usability testing in place to ensure users have smooth sailing
7. Perform Mobile testing as a priority:
8. Anticipate your Traffic in Advance:
9. Ensure to perform Geolocation Testing:
What are the strategies to become successful for e-commerce retailers during the Black Friday sales?
1. Re-organize your online merchandise:
2. Accelerate with Social Media and Paid Campaigns:
3. Implement Gift Guides for your targeted audience:
4. Make sure to Ensure Online Support to Visitors:
With the holiday season fast approaching, all e-commerce businesses and online stores should take the utmost care to ensure their sites and applications can hold heavy traffic volumes. They should further ensure secured transactions to their online shoppers. To achieve all this, the applications should be performance-tested, load tested, and usability tested which will help them deliver a seamless shopping experience to their customers
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