Cyber
Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) and Black Friday (the day after
Thanksgiving) are historically the two busiest online shopping days of the year
for many online retailers. Some retailers on our platform can make up to 30% of
their annual sales during these few days after Thanksgiving. We expect to see
more orders placed via mobile devices this holiday season than ever before.
Since it’s such an important time, we drilled into last year’s ecommerce sales
data to help you maximize your store’s sales this holiday season.
Let’s
start by looking at the Top 10 online shopping days for all Yahoo stores
combined in 2014.
Here
are some insights we can gain from this data.
1.
Six of the top ten sales days are Mondays and Tuesdays. Make sure you are
stocked up and are ready for business coming out of the weekend, because your
buyers are headed back to work, where they evidently do a lot of online
shopping.
2.
The third and seventh highest online sales days in the holiday season were
December 15 and 16. These are the last minute shoppers. Try to highlight
your fast shipping times during these days. Include a holiday shipping calendar
so shoppers know how late they can buy from you. Have a list of items that will
ship last minute if you can’t guarantee all items will ship on time.
3.
The day after Cyber Monday reported the fifth highest revenue day of the year. If
you normally run a sale from Black Friday through Cyber Monday to incentivize
conversion, think about including Tuesday, December 2 as well.
4.
An interesting omission from this Top 10 list is the Saturday right in
the
middle of the Black Friday to Cyber Monday spread. This is “Small
Business Saturday”, which promotes making purchases locally at
brick-and-mortar small businesses, so if you have a physical location
hopefully you see increased sales to make up for lower online sales.
Otherwise, Saturdays are the lowest online revenue days of the week year-round,
and this busiest time of year is no exception.
Armed
with this data, be aggressive with your advertising and promotions especially
on these days when shoppers will be out in force. You’ll want to be front and
center, ready to convert.
It
looks like we need to come up with more catchy names for these dates!
