Back to School Lesson for the Holidays

As ecommerce websites now play a major factor in how shoppers buy, its back to school for all of us. Retailers are reporting that the Back to School Sales have a different twist this year, Back to school shoppers are eyeing their emails, check circulars, comparing prices and most important waiting for that big discount to hit. Major Retailers have delayed launching their Back to School ad campaigns for the lay and wait shoppers.

Last year for the first time online sales surpassed brick and mortar sales throughout the holiday season. Back to School sales typically is an indicator on how ecommerce sales are going to be during the holiday season. Our ecommerce website sales philosophy is show them the best deals in October and November, then slowly pull them back as we get closer to Christmas. Theory being as we get closer to Christmas make the last minute shoppers pay for their procrastination.

What to do if all shoppers wait it out for the best deal of the 2015 Holiday E-Commerce Holiday Season? This is just an August 19, 2015 hypothesis, keep the grand sale to a minimum, so no 30% off everything sales, more to the case up to 30% on this category of products. (Golf Shirts). Offer threshold incentives, spend $100 on our website get Free Shipping. Rotate the items on sale and off sale.

For that savvy shopper that is going to wait until they fall off a cliff, create levels of discounts that when combined together, this shopper will have believed their perseverance, patients and forensic style research has paid off. So a combination of a sale day, a coupon and free shipping our savvy shoppers is happy.

As the shoppers linger around and poke our websites with sticks, this is also a great time to capitalize on the traffic they are creating. From your e-commerce website this is not the time to be stagnant or complacent, you will want to be flipping deals day to day and or 3 or 4 day sales drives, new deals and graphics on the homepage every other day (depending on traffic) and for those hot items use your folks who liked this also liked.