Traditionally in New Zealand, the best sales are usually on Boxing Day. People flock online and to Brick and Mortar shops to find the best deals. This year saw a huge surge for online shopping on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Retailers who were prepared and sent out newsletters and sales brochures got their bang for the buck. The pandemic has made people more comfortable shopping online for essentials and also for splurges. A segment that was not shopping online got used to it during the lockdown period. They are habitually shopping online with ease. Below are the stats for the American BFCM sales. It’s important to make one thing very clear: People spent a ton of money during BFCM this year, and they spent that money online. On Black Friday, Americans spent $9 billion online, up 21.6 percent from 2019. That’s a rate of $6.3 million per minute, and $27.50 per person. Also, foot traffic in stores plummeted 52.1 percent year-over-year; a large drop was expected due to the pandemic, but that is still a jarring number to see. While we’re likely to see some recovery post-pandemic, the heyday of in-store shopping may be over: one survey found 52 percent of people say they never plan on doing in-person holiday shopping again. Goodbye, Black Friday stampedes, we hardly knew ye. As a result of the huge drop in in-store shopping, overall Black Friday sales were down five percent, even with the large increase in online spending. On Cyber Monday, Americans spent even more: $10.8 billion, up 15.1 percent year-over-year. That makes Cyber Monday 2020 the largest U.S. internet shopping day of all time. However, nothing curbs enthusiasm around a record-breaking result like bloated expectations, and that’s what happened here. Adobe Analytics, one of the go-to retail industry prognosticators, projected $12.7 billion in Cyber Monday spending. That was $1.9 billion too optimistic. As a result, Adobe has revised its forecast for online holiday spending this year down to $184 billion from $189 billion. Even though that would be a 30 percent increase from 2019 it now somehow feels almost disappointing given the expectations. Did mobile shopping grow? Sales that originated on smartphones jumped 25.3 percent year-over-year to $3.6 billion on Black Friday, for 40 percent of the total eCommerce spend, which sounds significant—but really, that just means they kept pace. In 2019, mobile orders saw 22.2 percent growth to account for 39 percent of revenue. Shopify found much of the same in its numbers. On this year’s BFCM, 67 percent of Shopify sales were made on mobile; in 2019, it was 68 percent. Ways to ramp up your sales during the holiday season 1.     Ramp up your email send volume way before the holiday season There was a significant jump in the number of emails that stores using The average store sent 2.8 times more emails on Black Friday 2020 than 2019, two times more on Saturday, 2.9 times more on Sunday, and 3.1 times more on Cyber Monday. 2. Confirmed: The 2020 shopping season started earlier Much like the eCommerce industry as a whole, Stores sent an average of almost two times more emails in the week leading up to Black Friday 2020 than in that same time frame in 2019. Customers responded favourably to those earlier emails.

3. Automated emails were twice as lucrative on BFCM

Automations are the most lucrative emails a store can send—and on BFCM, they became even more valuable. The seven most popular types of automated emails (welcome new subscribers, cart abandonment, welcome first-time purchaser, thank repeat purchaser, review request, replenishment reminder, win-back) Automated emails are very profitable sent out before Black Friday & Cyber Monday. However, when you dig into the specific automations, some clearly performed better than others during the busiest shopping weekend of the yearThere are four automations that exceeded their averages from the previous three months.

• Cart abandonment emails, 132 percent increase in attributable revenue-per-email
• Welcome new subscribers, 72 percent increase
• Win-back emails, 38 percent increase
• Replenishment reminders, 26 percent increase

Cart abandonment emails also saw noticeably higher open and click-through rates on BFCM than earlier in the year. Open rates were up 25 percent, and click-through rates were up 26 percent. Takeaways. Online shopping is only going to grow pandemic or not. People have gotten used to shopping online. If you have a shop or are a home-based business you are leaving money on the table if you are not selling online. If your business has products to sell talk to us and we can help set up your online shop send you analytics and give you tips and tricks to grow your sales.