In our current moment, online shopping means more than just splurging on ourselves at our own convenience. The shadow of the tense fall has started to move behind us, and now, coming up on an eventful December, we as businesspeople and consumers are preparing for the joys of the holiday season. Regardless of your background, you will likely be hoping to enjoy the holidays with your family, sharing stories and food around the Thanksgiving table and gifts around the living room. With a year of lockdowns, quarantines and economic setbacks, unwinding with family and loved ones has never seemed more appealing.
With Thanksgiving around the corner, events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming up as well. These events in American tradition represent a swell of consumer activity around splurging on holiday gifts. Corporate culture has celebrated the consumer impulse to shop after Thanksgiving due to the massive boon to sales it provides many companies. We call this event “Black Friday” due to the event’s stimulation of sales.
Being “in the black” in financial-speak means being profitable. In most years, you could expect gargantuan lines stretching around Macy’s and other strip mall favorites, usually beginning at 2 or 3 in the morning until the opening of the stores around 6AM. However, given the unsettling rise in Covid-19 cases in the United States and across Europe, most people will not participate in Black Friday in person. The Black Friday fervor has therefore become increasingly channeled online, on E-Commerce platforms and online purchases.
Digital Black Friday and E-Commerce Businesses
Under normal circumstances, the focus on online sales gets placed on Cyber Monday, the Monday after Black Friday on which many companies place marked-down items on their web stores. However, given the pandemic, the entire shopping season of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and even pre-Christmas shopping can no longer be delineated as easily. The restrictions of social distancing have merged all of these holiday shopping events together into one, near-monolithic demand for E-Commerce.
Based on numbers dating to the beginning of November, the traditional start of early holiday shopping, one digital commerce aggregate noticed a spike in this year’s E-Commerce revenue. This report compares last year’s figures to this year’s, noting a 21% increase in overall E-Commerce revenue to an estimated $21.7 billion for the first ten days of November. According to Adobe Analytics, which closely tracks the revenue of 80 of the top 100 retailers in the United States, consumers spent $2.2 billion on November 2nd alone: a 31% jump from last year. The anxiety surrounding the election and the ongoing pandemic crisis has only served to stoke online sales, not dampen them. Furthermore, these figures are set to increase as we reach past Thanksgiving and into the height of the holiday season.
The Value an E-Commerce Software Consultant Can Provide Your Business
When discussing E-Commerce, one can easily forget the steps necessary to fulfill orders due to the apparent straightforwardness of clicking a button and buying a product from home. For E-Commerce companies, tapping purchase on your laptop or smartphone and placing an order is only one step in the process of getting that product to your home. In order to get that product to a customer’s home, a company must process that order, procure all of the necessary information for sales and shipment (i.e. a person’s credit card information, billing address and shipping address) and reserve the items requested in the company’s inventory. With a torrent of purchases coming due to the holiday season, a business can become easily overwhelmed with this increase in demand. In the worst case scenario, an E-Commerce business can underperform by not fulfilling their customers’ orders in a timely manner.
In order to offset some of the difficulties presented by this increase in E-Commerce demand, a business (regardless of being B2C or B2B) can enlist the help of an E-Commerce software developer and consultant, who can help them streamline order information and manage their inventory. Hypothetically, let’s say a business is experiencing more orders for their products than usual this time of year. A web or mobile application software developer can monitor this business’s servers, provide web maintenance or development, and even manage a business’s orders in order to increase the E-Commerce owner’s threshold for sales.
Tools Provided by a Custom Web and Mobile E-Commerce Developer
A custom software developer has the benefit of being able to bridge multiple channels and parties together. Through a simple integration, a web developer can route the orders of an E-Commerce platform to a company’s manufacturer, ensuring plenty of inventory of popular gift items ahead of the holidays. If a business starts with an order capacity of 100, that same business can reach an order capacity of 1000 through the help of an E-Commerce software developer.
By moving a business’s E-Commerce server to the Cloud, this software consultant can increase speed and reduce lag time for buyers on the web or mobile app. Rather than taking 5 minutes to process an order, a web page can process orders immediately. If a business is better at making or manufacturing a product than selling it digitally, a software consultant can help them with both digital marketing and online operations. Regardless of what a business needs for its particular market, an E-Commerce roadmap produced in partnership with a web developer can raise the revenue and overall customer experience of that given company – whether it be a small local business or an international sales conglomerate.