Black Friday and Cyber Monday Mark a Huge Start for the 2011 Holiday Shopping Season
Toronto, ON - OrderDynamics merchants saw a significant impact on sales with the onset of the US Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend. Trends indicated that many consumers began their shopping on Thanksgiving Day despite brick and mortar retail outlets being closed, leading to a 39% increase in online sales over Thanksgiving 2010. As reported by InternetRetailer.com, Thanksgiving Day web revenue grossed upwards of $550 million – a sure sign that many consumers are starting Christmas shopping earlier given the right promotion.
This year’s Black Friday also showed big numbers for eCommerce. While overall Black Friday sales were up 6.6%, online revenue boasted a growth of 24.3% over last year. Even daily deal site LivingSocial.com reported sales of almost 150,000 purchases. Many OrderDynamics e-retailers saw sales double, with some even tripling average daily numbers and saw strong sales perpetuate throughout the weekend. “We processed 93% more orders for Black Friday through Cyber Monday this year,” reports Michael Turcsanyi, President of OrderDynamics. “Overall, OrderDynamics merchants pulled in 140% more revenue over the same weekend last year. It’s very exciting to see that kind of growth.”
The greatest success was Cyber Monday, grossing the highest online sales in history at $1.25 billion. Though not entirely unexpected, e-retailers’ overall sales were up 33% from last year’s Cyber Monday. This year, the concept of offering large discounts the first Monday day after the US Thanksgiving was more heavily adopted in Canada, which likely contributed to the extra push. Canadian OrderDynamics merchants such as Henry’s Camera reported similar success to US counterparts, making Cyber Monday even more lucrative than Black Friday for OrderDynamics e-tailers.
Of course, several online retailers suffered a less than fruitful holiday weekend. Several site outages and performance issues lead to inconvenient downtime and lost revenue. Most notably, VictoriasSecret.com experienced an 80-minute interruption on Black Friday, while increased traffic to Ann Inc’s AnnTaylor.com triggered a Cyber Monday outage. American Eagle Outfitters’ site, ae.com, saw a total of 8 hours of downtime throughout the entire weekend, and a 350% spike in traffic caused difficulties for PayPal as well. Now notorious for frequent site outages, Target.com had several loading errors allowing pages to only be partially viewed. Catchpoint Systems Inc. put together a list of sites with the most performance issues over the Thanksgiving weekend.
Along with high profits, the Thanksgiving weekend offers lessons to be learned. The Conference Board Consumer Research Centre index reported on research findings that consumers have been viewing the current economic climate more positively lately, which through increased spending can continue to trend upwards. This, coupled with excellent online promotions encouraged an earlier start to the holiday shopping season. Online and mobile retailers should aim to prepare themselves for next year in a number of ways: offer promotions earlier, and make sure consumers are well aware of them with strong email campaigns; use ‘Thanksgiving Day-Only’ sales to intrigue those who may consider waiting until Black Friday. Thanksgiving weekend has proven to be far too profitable to risk site outages, and as such sites and mobile apps should be tweaked and tested to accommodate promotions and sustain higher than normal traffic.
To combat possible performance problems and to ensure the best shopping experience for the end consumer, the OrderDynamics SaaS platform enables extreme scalability under high order volumes. Using proprietary order processing technology that enables high rates of order capture, and the ability to elastically expand their cloud infrastructure, OrderDynamics helps ensure smooth running even for the most unexpected shopping surges. “We maintain significant on-demand capacity in our SaaS infrastructure to protect merchants against inevitable spikes” says Steven Berkovitz, Co-Founder and On-Demand Platform Architect. “In addition, we operate a single version of our software, allowing us to make performance enhancements to our core platform which immediately benefits all of our clients without needing to make costly customizations”. One of the main reasons for changing ecommerce platforms is due to instability and reliability problems of the existing website.
The start of the 2011 holiday shopping season proved to also be a great opportunity for mobile retailers. Thanksgiving Day showed the largest proportion of mobile sales at 11.09%, followed by 9.8% of online sales on Black Friday, and 6.6% on Cyber Monday. With a greater selection of advanced mobile devices, it is not surprising that purchases on smartphones greatly exceeded 2010 statistics.
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