The holiday season can be the most wonderful, but also the most stressful time of the year for shops. Our data analysis of last Black Friday’s numbers have clearly shown the turnover increasing potential of this day - it actually broke all the records with digital-shoppers spending $7.4 billion online worldwide.
With Black Friday signaling the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping period, the countdown has started to optimize your shop for the busy holiday season.
Why this years holiday season sales are special
According to several studies online shopping has increased remarkably since COVID-19. By people having to stay at home more often, saving money on travel and investing more into one’s home (home office, home fitness etc.), this development will not only strongly influence this years’ holiday season sales but will also have lasting effects.
This blog will give you some useful tips and strategies to increase your turnover during this sales season and beyond.
The holiday season 2020 will be like no other sale season so far due to the pandemic we are currently living through.
Optimize your webshop for the holiday season
Coming originally from the US, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have also been growing increasingly in Europe over the last years. As most of the existing studies and statistics solely focus on sales data of the US, we conducted an analysis of last Black Friday sales data in Europe in order to provide an extensive overview of the European market.
In our data analysis from 2019, we have found that the increase in turnover has even exceeded our highest forecast with an increase of almost 13% in turnover compared to the year before. Alongside that, Black Friday 2019 generated 2,7x more sales than a regular Friday.
Since the start of the pandemic, online-shopping up until now has increased by 59% worldwide in comparison to the previous year. With consumers shopping online instead of going to physical stores and spending money they saved forgoing travels and dining experiences, we can expect record-breaking numbers for this years’ holiday season, according to Forbes.
Having these statistics and predictions in mind, merchants now have the chance to easily outperform the market with the right marketing and ecommerce strategies.
With the holiday shopping season starting earlier and earlier every year, it is important to not make the mistake to see Black Friday or Cyber Monday as single days, but rather the whole month as what is now referred to as “Cyber November”or “Black November”.
To help you increase your turnover during this time and beyond, we have identified 5 ecommerce tips that will help your business skyrocket this holiday sales season!
Ways Multisafepay can help you
1. Selling cross-border
You can easily increase your turnover by being active in different countries. Optimize your shop for cross-border sales by allowing your customers to pay with their preferred payment methods. With MultiSafepay you can select from a mix of over 30 local and cross-border payment methods such as iDEAL and Bancontact (local payment methods) and VISA and Apple Pay (cross-border payment methods).
By offering additional services like multi-languages support and advanced reporting solutions, we can help you to expand your sales cross-border.
2. Rescue abandoned carts
According to Statista, shopping cart abandonment in online shopping is worldwide at 75% with the reason being that customers often tend to be indecisive about spontaneous purchases. With MultiSafepay’s “Keep Cart Alive” function customers find their once added products in their cart when coming back to your shop - and potentially purchase them seeing them again.
Another option to follow up on uncompleted purchases are Second Chance emails that are being sent when a customer initiates a payment but does not finish it for any reason.
Reminding customers about your shop is a perfect option considering that the holiday season comes with several peak days.
3. Offer deferred payment options
Being confronted with various great deals and discounts, customers tend to make here-and-now decisions. Therefore, the opportunity to get the item but delay the payment is very popular amongst consumers. Payment methods available with MultiSafepay such as Klarna, Afterpay, Santander and our own method Pay after Delivery thereby increases consumers' readiness to make purchases.
Having in mind that the time before Christmas is always quite expensive, paying in installments is an attractive option for your consumers particularly for order values up to 8.000€. A convenient option here is Santander which allows consumers to quickly and safely set up loan plans for their purchases. Available with MultiSafepay,Santander gives your consumers the opportunity to enjoy an item straight away but pay later while still guaranteeing you the payout and the chance to reach higher average order values in your shop.
4. Prevent Cyber Criminality
Unfortunately, with the boom of online-shopping also comes cyber criminality. To keep your payments safe and secure, MultiSafepay offers optimal fraud protection using advanced fraud filter settings as well as the highest PCI DSS standards and 3D Secure technology.
3D secure technology is an additional security layer for credit and debit card transactions by requiring the cardholder to verify his identity at the credit card provider’s website before a payment can be accepted. This way, fraud-based chargebacks are no longer possible.
To facilitate your balance between security and risk, our Flexible 3D feature allows you to easily enable and disable 3D Secure at an API level. Giving you more control of your risk and conversion journey.
Being an acquirer and processor for credit cards such as VISA and Mastercard, MultiSafepay does not rely on third-parties to process transactions and manages the entire end to end payment flows and therefore allows you complete control over benefit-risk assessment and conversion optimization.
5. Improve your mobile checkout
We have seen already that not least COVID-19 has accelerated the shift towards predominantly digital shopping.
With mobile apps and responsive shops being the most popular options for consumers and merchants alike, our Progressive Web Apps allow you to combine the advantages of both easily within one single platform.
Bypassing different developing processes and costs, this solution provides you the opportunity to leverage push notifications to enhance repeat purchases, offline usage and to present your audience with an user-friendly app experience.
Tokenization is a great feature here to improve the payment experience in your checkout even more. Implemented into your shop, Tokenization keeps transactions safe and secure and helps enabling one-click payments, subscriptions and repeat purchases.
The best days to boost your sales
In this overview you can see the most important spending days and major holidays of this season you should be prepared for.
| Black Friday | November 27 |
| Cyber Monday | November 30 |
| Sinterklaas | December 06 |
| Green Monday | December 14 |
| Christmas | December 25 |
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