Whether we like it or not, the Black Friday retail sales event is here to stay. I say this based on personal experience and the experience of other Aussie retailers.
A gift shop I spoke with yesterday told me they doubled last year’s results and sole more than $5,000 in gifts online.
A homewares store owner told me that sales this year tripled what they did last year, delivering more than $10,000 in additional business.
Both commented that they considered the event itself boosted traffic to their websites from people looking at what was available and that, in each case, at least half purchases were at full price.
In our own case, we kicked it off in-store and online Thursday at lunchtime. While in-store store has been good, online has been excellent, achieving 100% growth off a good based from 2019.
We didn’t spend any money on ads or paid social media. Rather, we leveraged our email database and free social media posts.
Looking at online sales for one store, a small high street store, I can attribute more than $5,000 in online sales to the Black Friday event, with most of this coming from new shoppers. Now, it’s taken 3 years to get here, the be ranked by google, to have a good email database and to have access to sought-after products in a niche retailers who focus on price don’t play in. This has means that our Black Friday discount can be modest, yet interesting.
Whether retailers like it or not, you have no choice but to engage with seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There is money to be made.
Online is the best way to engage with Black Friday / Cyber Monday. While plenty of retailers have success with in-store, it is online where there is the most traffic. Also, as I harp on about, online never closes so you can transact with shoppers online at 1am and 2am and happily take their money if you have what they are looking for.
I get that plenty of small business retailers are yet to embrace online for their businesses because it seems too hard. I’d note that in almost every situation, the comment after getting online is I wish I’d done it sooner, I had no idea.
If you want to make money from Black Friday / Cyber Monday next year or any other growing online sales event, get online asap, so you are ready.
Spot on join the market compete or miss out.
Activity breeds activity.