Presented by Shopify
The NFL’s Super Bowl is the biggest night of the year for football. For retailers, the big game looks a bit different — it lasts for four days, kicks off immediately after Thanksgiving and the ends on Cyber Monday. The retail Super Bowl means that online shopping jolts into overdrive and the holiday season is officially upon us.
In a highly competitive retail climate, there is great reward for the victors. A huge portion of yearly revenue is derived during this critical four-day period. Last year, more than 154 million consumers shopped over Thanksgiving weekend, spending an average of nearly $290 per person. A strong Black Friday weekend performance often sets the tone for the rest of the holiday shopping season.
But there’s also a lot of risks. Retailers need to stock on-trend merchandise. Savvy marketing plans take months to prepare and must reach the right target audience. Staff need to be trained and stores need the appropriate level of help to address the significant boost in traffic. And pricing must match consumer expectations.
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Technology you can count on
Beyond all those traditional brick-and- mortar concerns, in today’s ever-increasing digital landscape, retailers must ensure their technology works, and their ecommerce operations run as smoothly as possibly. With nearly 9 percent of consumer spending now occurring via Internet-enabled channels, a retailer’s ecommerce store can no longer be an afterthought, it has to be front and centre in their Black Friday, Cyber Monday strategy.
If it breaks….
Ensuring your online store runs without any hiccups is easier said than done. Each year, well-known retail websites crash because they were unable to handle the swell of traffic. In 2016, Macy’s and Express each ran into trouble when they couldn’t handle the influx of online traffic. Best Buy, Neiman Marcus, and Target have also experienced outages in years past.
When that happens, big brands run the risk of angering potential customers at a time when sales couldn’t be more critical. If your website isn’t loading or processing orders, shoppers can quickly browse for a competitor that isn’t suffering from the same woes. A click away from your website means a sale can be lost in a manner of seconds, and many of those consumers never come back.
The risk-reward element
Black Friday weekend has heightened in recent years because so much holiday spending is now concentrated on just a few days during the five-week holiday period. With retailers throwing monster sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, shoppers have been conditioned to focus their online shopping to those those days — resulting in a meteoric surge in volume that simply doesn’t exist the rest of the year.
You’re not alone — it’s our Super Bowl too
At Shopify, we obsess over the Black Friday weekend too. While we don’t run a retail store ourselves, the Shopify platform supports 500,000 retailers worldwide who rely on us throughout the year, and especially during peak holiday seasons. Over 131 million people have made a purchase on a Shopify store within the past year so chances are, if you shopped online recently, you’ve visited a Shopify store, and just didn’t know it.
With so many merchants and stores relying on Shopify, Black Friday weekend is our Super Bowl too. Our goal is to ensure that our customers’ online stores can handle the huge volumes, run fast, and give their customers an exceptional experience.
Each year, our obsession with the Black Friday weekend pays off for our merchants. In 2016, not a single store on Shopify crashed during this frantic period. We saw huge volume on our customers’ stores, which translated into big sales and happy shoppers. We want merchants to have confidence to focus on what they do best — creating and selling amazing products — while leaving the worrying about their ecommerce platform to us.
Loren Padelford is VP & GM of Shopify Plus.
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