Black Friday, the opening of the Christmas season after Thanksgiving, which also arrived in Europe years ago from the United States, has grown over the years from a single sales day to even a week-long campaign. For many traders, this particular week is by far the best of the year in terms of sales. Millions of Shopify merchants also participated in the busiest sales meetings of the year. Shopify released a new record-breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend summary.
So how should online retailers interpret these wild BFCM sales figures, invested marketing euros and abundant visitor traffic on the pages? Do the wild sales figures also tell the whole truth, or how can each merchant benefit in their own way from this increased traffic?
2022 Shopify BFCM Highlights:
- Weekend sales 7.5 billion euros, 19% growth from 2021
- More than 52 million consumers bought from a brand using Shopify, 12% growth from 2021
- Highest sales peak 3.5M USD per minute
- Average purchase 102.1USD
- 73% of purchases were made on mobile devices, 27% of purchases were made on a computer
- More than 56,000 tonnes of carbon removal funded to counteract emissions
Shopify's technical excellence
With the busy sales season and the increase in visitor traffic, many online retailers may worry about the site's functionality during this time. As Shopify showed in its report, there are many millions of visitors and sales transactions in minutes globally, so millions of stores must remain technically functional 24/7. Shopify demonstrates excellence with technical operational reliability, which enables customers to have an excellent customer experience and merchants the opportunity to focus on things that promote sales instead of ensuring the operation of the site.
This operational reliability is one of Shopify's competitive advantages, which is also reflected in the increased number of merchants on the platform. The store must be functional 24/7 on all devices, especially mobile. As can also be seen from the report, the vast majority of purchases are made on mobile devices. Shopify's themes are designed to be mobile-friendly, so the mobile customer experience remains at a high level until the purchase decision is made.
Responsible buying
Shopify also demonstrates its excellence as a platform and as an ecosystem on the responsibility front. Black Friday strongly divides opinions among companies and consumers. Some do not participate in the campaign period in question at all, while for some, success on Black Friday is business-wise relevant.
Concern for the environment is associated with large consumption and moving goods, for which Shopify's ecosystem offers tools for the implementation of more responsible business, e.g. With Shopify's own the Planet app. You can read more about Shopify's climate actions here.
Learn and analyze
Abundant visitor traffic and events in your online store provide a great opportunity to learn more about your customers. Your brand probably gained a lot of new customers, but also strengthened your existing customer relationships.
After the time-consuming preparations for the Black Friday week and the large marketing investments, you shouldn't just admire the sales figures. It does not necessarily tell the whole truth about your sales. And if you achieved good sales numbers and did it profitably, that's fine, but there's always a chance to learn something new by studying the data.
One critical metric from the point of view of success can only be measured after the campaign. This year, the most purchased industry was clothing and accessories, where we struggle with high return rates. So research the sales that took place during the BF campaign and the resulting possible returns. Deepen your understanding, from the whole to the product level, marketing campaigns and payment methods. Minimizing returns is one of the important means of implementing responsible business.
If the return percentages of your sales are low or non-existent, you can still learn and analyze the data during the campaign. How was the traffic directed to your site and are there significant differences in these sources of income? Did you manage to sell the products you picked up or did the products still remain in the shopping cart? Did you manage to sell individual products or did the purchases form wholes? Which payment method is most often used, is it the most profitable of the payment methods?
There are plenty of optimization methods and things to analyze, so you always have the opportunity to learn more about your customers and innovate based on insights.
Innovate and develop
When you have analyzed and learned more about your customers, you have gained new perspectives. After analyzing the returns, you may have noticed that certain products have been returned or some buyers have returned the entire shopping cart. You definitely want to know why this happened. Was the product the wrong type in relation to the product description in the store or was the product just not pleasing compared to the competitor.
You can collect this information in the simplest way by calling the customer, or alternatively, automate it in the form of a feedback survey. With the collected information, you can enrich your product information or develop your product in the desired direction.
Stick to what's most important to you
Even more valuable than analyzing returns is to hold on to new and previously purchased customers even more tightly. Offer these profitable customers the opportunity to influence and give feedback on your products. With Shopify's segmentation tools, you can segment customers of different levels into their own groups, giving you the opportunity to communicate with them in an increasingly personalized way and offer new product recommendations and campaigns based on previous purchases.
Acquiring a new customer is basically always more expensive than maintaining an existing customer and upselling. So focus on maintaining these customer relationships and communicating. With the help of Shopify and its apps, you can take care of your current customers at a high level.
With Shopify's cohort analysis, you can see when first-time customers make their next purchase, so you can remind your customer of your existence in a timely manner. In addition to this, you can build customer loyalty with, for example, the Yotpo's Loyalty app, in which case you can reward the customer for his loyalty to your brand.
Summary
With the Black Friday campaign coming to the end of the year, it is certainly timely to prepare in the short term to analyze the entire year and how you succeeded compared to other years. Shopify offers excellent tools to analyze and optimize your business in a more profitable and responsible direction.
If you need a partner to proactively bring insights into developing trends and the development of a profitable business, contact us, we will be happy to help!
