Online retailers across the globe are mimicking holiday sales events like Black Friday with their own mega-shopping holidays to drive sales volume during what would normally be slow shopping periods. These events, including Amazon’s Prime Day and Alibaba’s Singles’ Day, can drive billions of dollars in sales on a single day. They’ve become key pillars of the online channel experience that brands must consider and plan for as part of their ecommerce strategy.
Seeing the sales spike on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, ambitious retailers such as Amazon and Alibaba are creating their own mega-sales events that are not anchored to traditional shopping days. Online retail giant Amazon launched Prime Day in 2015 to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary, breaking records with 34.4 million items ordered across nine Prime-eligible countries.
The "traditional" mega-shopping holidays, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, have developed into a four-day long online sales holiday alongside the growing prevalence of residential broadband access. In 2015, US shoppers spent over $11 billion online between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday, accounting for one third of total shopping over the weekend. According to Adobe’s Digital Index, Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales were roughly $3 billion each in 2015, both up 12%.
With millions of consumers attempting to place orders in parallel, mega-shopping holidays have proved invaluable when it comes to stress-testing platforms and ecommerce ecosystems. Retailers, brands, and fulfillment partners are put to the test, often identifying system weaknesses that can to be corrected to prepare for the next big online sales event, and to accommodate a general increase in eCommerce penetration.
Each year these mega-shopping holidays are hitting record highs, due to more consumers moving their shopping to online brands and retailers are using these events as inflection points to drive sales and online penetration. For brands, part of managing the online channel means winning visibility and sales during the increasingly critical in mega-sales events.
Download our guide, Preparing to Win Mega-Shopping Holidays, and see how your brand can prepare to win the digital shelf all year long.
