Winter Is Coming

It’s fast approaching one of the busiest and profitable times in the UK for retailers and eCommerce businesses alike. Over the next three months, there is a total of 6 UK holidays that customers are gearing up and getting some practice in for their soon-to-be clicking fingers. The question is, is your online business ready for them?

As this blog goes out, Halloween will already be upon us, the next UK Event would be the anticipated Bonfire Night. If you are a small business, then this is a holiday you should look out for. Every year communities across the UK gather to celebrate the failure of the Guy Fawkes gun powder plot, Kids run around with sparklers and fireworks light up the sky across the country. If the Brits love anything, it’s gaudy light up toys to run around whilst watching these mesmerising displays.

One way to prepare your business for an event like this is to create promotions around the event. Give them a deal that only lasts for bonfire night (or day) that they can sink their teeth into. BetterCommerce offers a dedicated section to promotions, especially for the holiday season. Whether you want a simple ‘Buy One Get One Free’ or a customised ‘Buy X for Y Fixed Price’ we have it to help you get the best out of the holidays.

The next holiday is the highly anticipated (and in some cases feared) Black Friday. This is one of the biggest UK retail days in the calendar and has only been around for 5 years. Originally being a day for brick-and-mortar (BnM) businesses, it has progressed into an online frenzy. Last year, online shopping sales went up by 11.7% from 2016, compared to BnM that went down by 3.6%. Similar results are forecasted for this year. In a PwC survey, 9 in 10 shoppers are planning to cash in on deals that day, with the prominent amount stating they would be shopping online, 60% of over 65s plan to do as such.

As Black Friday is a mostly new phenomenon in the UK, there is no set standards for how long businesses should run their deals. It has progressed from 1 day to the whole weekend, ending in the big blowout Cyber Monday. Once again online sales have been rising in this sector as well, with an increase of 3% last year compared to 2016. Both days culminated in a 228% increase in revenue compared to a normal week.

Manic Monday is another holiday that is unknown but fast gaining steam in the UK. This day came more out of a trend rather than a pre-determined day. Retail stats found that the second Monday of December was becoming a popular day for people to shop, racking up 120 million site visits within 24 hours back in 2013, just beating Cyber Monday.

Will Your website be able to handle this amount of traffic?

BetterCommerce has seen it before where our customer’s competitor website couldn’t handle the pressure and crashed under heavy traffic and stayed down for more than 3 hours. Someone’s loss is another’s gain. Their loss became the gain for our customer who did 40% more revenue than expected on the day. (read more about this is our case study).

Don’t let your platform be the reason you lose out.

For our clients, BetterCommerce is backed-up with a dual geo-redundant instance configuration from being a part of Microsoft Azure. This is designed to provide our clients with 99.9% availability of your site by replicating your data and storing it in a secondary location. This means that in cases where there could be a complete regional outage or disaster, your website will still be up and running.

Lastly, The biggest holiday of the year by far is Christmas. Christmas is a time of sharing a love with family and friends, and what better way to do this than through the giving of presents. However, the past year has left consumer spending habits up in the air.

The UK economy is incredibly uncertain, wages continue to stagnate for millions, there are historically high levels of household debt, and Brexit is causing large amounts of worry and uncertainty across the country.

If you are a small business and want to get the most out of Christmas this year, then it’s not just promotions and deals you need to be showing. You need to be able to listen and answer your consumer needs. Communication is key, customer service is key.

BetterCommerce understands this need for high-quality customer service. Our platform is completely customer-centric. Features include a Feefo integration, elastic search, and a customer360 view. Coming soon is an artificially intelligent bot that allows users to check their order status via any communication channel – Skype, email, SMS or Facebook messenger.

Make Christmas a seamless experience where your customers know they are cared for.

Was this blog useful? Let us know your thoughts by writing to us at [email protected].