Tag: Black Friday

Mobile Phones ‘driving 56% of holiday online fashion sales’

~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment

  • “Consumers are growing more comfortable buying fashion items on their phones reveals new Black Friday and Cyber Monday data from AI-powered retail personalisation platform, Nosto. And for fashion retailers, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 was 36% bigger than last year.
  • Nosto’s analysis of millions of visits to fashion sites globally suggests mobile accounted for 71% of traffic and 56% of sales revenue (up from 64% of traffic and 50% of sales revenue in 2017) on the two holiday shopping days. Conversion rates are also up on mobile phones from 1.98% last year to 2.28% in 2018″

https://www.google.com/amp/www.netimperative.com/2018/11/mobile-phones-driving-56-of-festive-online-fashion-sales/amp/

Black Friday: Traffic +7.7% / AOV +3.5% / Conversion -11.3%

~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment

Wow…this press release is a treasure trove of data on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the entire shopping weekend for US, UK and Canada. Here’s just a snippet…

“In the U.S., 2018 Thanksgiving holiday shopping bounce rates increased by 12 percent from 2017. Additionally, cart abandonment rates increased by 2.6 percent and conversion rates decreased by 9.7 percent. Black Friday shopping in the U.S. revealed mixed results compared to 2017; while traffic was up 7.7 percent and Average Order Value (AOV) increased 2.5 percent, conversation rates were down 11.3 percent. On Cyber Monday, AOV was up 3.4 percent, but conversion rates were down 16.2 percent—a continuation of the YOY trend of U.S. shoppers consolidating purchases on the biggest online shopping day of the year.

“The holiday shopping period presents tremendous opportunity for retailers to win new shoppers and convert them into returning customers. Our data, however, reveals that brands are struggling to take advantage of this opportunity,” said Stephen Collins, CEO of Monetate. “Retailers must reconsider their engagement strategies to ensure they are capitalizing on increased website visits. It’s imperative that retailers leverage every data point at their disposal to create the best and most relevant experiences for shoppers.”

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181127005850/en/Monetate’s-Day-Global-Holiday-Ecommerce-Analysis-Reveals

7.6% – average yearly financial expense attributed to fraud

~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment

  • According to a 2016 report, the average yearly financial expense attributed to fraud for retailers was 7.6 percent of annual revenue across all channels, including online and offline sales. And that is on a business-as-usual day. On peak-retail days, clients operating on Amazon have reportedly seen an increase of 150 percent in fraud attempts.
  • But the online retail anti-fraud business is about to change, and that change is going to affect consumers and retailers as well. This is due to new EU regulation called PSD2. PSD2, which comes into effect in mid-2019, is mainly about opening bank APIs to 3rd parties. But it also includes provisions applying to online sales.
  • The intention of this directive is good at heart but unnecessarily provides friction to the more than 99 percent of users out there that are good, according to Lee: “We are essentially making buyers conform to a set of rules because the system is being exploited by a select few bad apples.
  • White said this is going to have a tremendous impact on the market, specifically in the e-commerce space: “Conversion rates are already low in this space, and any added obstacles or friction could correlate into an increase in cart abandonments.
    • This can be a difficult task because if it was simple we wouldn’t need the predictive power of machine learning in the first place.

    And they’re off! Black Friday, the Super Bowl of shopping, kicks off holiday season

    ~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment

    CSONDY, GETTY IMAGES

    • On Thanksgiving Day, the traffic flowing through mobile devices represented 68 percent of all online traffic, according to Salesforce. And 54 percent of all digital orders that day were made through smart phones, the most of any day this year and roughly 30 percent more than in 2017.
    • Social media is also playing a growing role, with nearly 8 percent of traffic on Thanksgiving Day generated by platforms like Instagram and Facebook — a more than 40 percent uptick over 2017.
    • Digital research firm eMarketer has similar figures, saying that e-commerce spending will rise 16.6% to $123.73 billion, making up 12.3% of total holiday retail sales — the largest chunk ever.

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/2056063002

    Pre-Black Friday Online Sales Spike 17% – PYMNTS.com

    ~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment

    “U.S. consumers increased their online shopping by nearly 17 percent before Black Friday, according to new data published by Adobe Analytics this week. Online shopping spend topped $31.9 billion in the first 20 days of November, including the first ‘$2 billion day of the season,‘ analysts said. That day was Monday, Nov. 19.”

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2018/adobe-online-sales-black-friday-holiday-shopping/amp/

    Salesforce: 40% Of 2018’s Retail Revenue Will Happen This Week During Black Friday and Cyber Monday

    ~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment

    Mobile will be key.

    So will AI, for perhaps the first time, as smart systems are helping to drive more than a third of all retail revenue.

    • This upcoming Cyber Week will be the biggest digital week ever. We predict that 40% of the entire shopping season’s revenue will be made the first week of the season, which is up from 32% last year. Black Friday, predicted to be up 19% and Cyber Monday, up 16%, will lead the charge for the critical Cyber Week period.
    • This is the year that mobile wins! Shoppers will again turn to their phones for visiting sites – as phones will drive 68% of the season’s traffic. 
    • And on peak mobile days, like Christmas Eve, mobile will drive a massive 72% of all traffic and 54% of all orders.
    • Over the last year, we’ve seen shoppers come to appreciate the value of AI in their overall shopping experience. AI-powered product recommendations have had a massive impact and are driving 37% of all revenue

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/11/20/salesforce-40-of-retail-revenue-will-happen-this-week-during-black-friday-and-cyber-monday/amp/

    Refresher: 2017 eCommerce Holiday Spending Report

    ~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment

    As we wrap 11/11 (aka Singles Day) we have officially begun the start of the holiday shopping season. With that in mind, I thought it would be the perfect time for a 2017 refresher.

    • “As Deloitte predicted, the weeks leading up to Black Friday/late November and late December accounted for up to 80% of retail sales in the holiday season, with online retail shopping emerging the clear winner in sales contributions.
    • The National Retail Federation revealed last week that retail sales outperformed last year’s numbers by over 5.5%, with revenue from online sales and non-store sales shot to $138.4 billion, seeing an 11.5% rise over last year’s numbers.
    • According to Adobe Insights, 2017 is the first year where holiday sales have surpassed the $100 billion mark in digital transactions alone.
    • The number of in-store shoppers dropped by 3 million to 99 million from last year, while online shoppers increased to 108 million, a 5 million increase from last year.”

    https://medium.com/gobeyond-ai/2017-ecommerce-holiday-spending-report-63b03b8a9031

    These Marketers Are Crunching Mounds of Data and Using AI to Understand the Customer Experience – AdWeek (Lauren Johnson)

    ~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment
    Image Credit: Getty Images
    These Marketers Are Crunching Mounds of Data and Using AI to Understand the Customer Experience

    • “Steinberg claims that the AI and data-based processes generate up to 1600 percent higher rate of returns compared to generically targeted marketing. While traditional lookalike targeting creates broad nets for targeting—like women between 16 and 50 years old—AI analyzes and matches broader sets of data such as websites, weather and location for more specific targeting.”
    • “If you have five sources of data, you end up with 25 or 50 different connections that you need to create as an engineering team,” he said. “People wanting to use machine learning to build better products or better customer experience are discovering that they really need to focus on first-party data that they’ve pulled together from their own product and their own interactions with their customers.”

    Read Full Post

    ai eCommerce News – Oct 25

    ~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment
    Image credit: Norcal.news
    COULD AI HOLD THE KEY TO YOUR E-COMMERCE SITE KEEPING UP THIS BLACK FRIDAY?
    • “Artificial intelligence may be your lifeline in the lead up to Black Friday’s sheer madness. No matter how good you are at multitasking or marketing, there’s no way to keep track of all of the consumer data that determines whether people are likely to convert. This doesn’t mean, however, that the relevant information doesn’t exist. You just have to increase your capability to process it all.
    • AI tools like Sentient Aware augment your outreach power in a few crucial ways, including
      • Collecting information about users from the instant they interact with your omnichannel brand footprint,
      • Integrating performance data to help you understand the pain points associated with using your pages, such as slow load times,
      • Segmenting your visitors by device to discover whether you could be doing more to accommodate busy consumers”

    Inside Aaron Levie’s Plan To Make Box Your Office’s Gateway To AI
    • “The greatest challenge facing Box in its AI push could prove a variation of the “garbage in, garbage out” problem. In that challenge, algorithms trained on low quality data sets learn bad insights – they spot patterns or make inferences that are incorrect, limited by the quality of the information available. Box will face a similar challenge by outsourcing the machine learning and AI tools in its platform, says Gartner analyst Darin Stewart. Quality and capability could vary widely working with third parties, he says, adding that Box will need to carefully monitor what it chooses to expose to customers. Box is also not alone in pushing into AI among content management players, says Forester Research analyst Cheryl McKinnon. ‘AI and machine learning will be the big area of disruption in 2018 – so the ability to move quickly and deliver real value to customers will be key.'”

    Amazon will open AI center in Germany
    • “Amazon has announced it will open a research center in Germany that’s focused on developing artificial intelligence to improve the customer experience. Amazon wants to create over a hundred high-skilled jobs in machine learning at this new Amazon Research Center.
    • The goal of the new research hub is to use artificial intelligence (AI) so the ecommerce company can better understand visual data and, as a result, improve the customer experience across the different products and services Amazon has to offer, such as Amazon Web Service and its AI assistant Alexa.”

    How Pinterest uses AI to learn (and sell) your style
    • “At Pinterest, Fan has led efforts to launch products like Lens, a computer vision-powered tool for image searches and ecommerce, and Shop the Look, which also made its debut earlier this year. Shop the Look places a blue dot on images that, when clicked, displays recommendations of similar items available for purchase.
    • “From the baseline, we noticed that merchants that are part of a partnership for Shop the Look, they’ve seen double clickthrough-rate to ecommerce sites and 2 to 6 times engagement on Pinterest of their product,” she said.”

    How AI helped Walmart go from 700,000 to 60 million items online
    • “Walmart.com is bigger than you might think. The site has 60 million items for sale, Walmart CTO Jeremy King said at the VB Summit in Berkeley, California today.
    • That’s up from 700,000 items when he joined Walmart in 2011, and it doesn’t include Jet.com, the ecommerce site Walmart acquired last year. Online sales have also made notable gains: The company reported a 67 percent year-over-year increase in quarterly online sales for the three months ending in June of this year. (That revenue growth was helped by Walmart’s Jet acquisition, though the company said the majority of its gains were organic.)
    • The secret to the expansion in inventory, said King, is artificial intelligence.”

    Kroger announces new initiative aimed at bolstering its e-commerce and omnichannel business
    • “Kroger has revealed a new initiative, dubbed Restock Kroger, that aims to build out its e-commerce and omnichannel businesses, Internet Retailer reports. Kroger is the second-largest grocer in the US, and appears to recognize that a revamp of its digital options is in order if it’s to maintain that position. The initiative is expected to cost $9 billion over the next three years.
    • This is part of Kroger’s ongoing effort to provide quality online and omnichannel grocery options. Kroger had already planned to expand its online grocery pickup offering to 1,000 stores by the end of 2017, and has acquired multiple retailers with e-commerce value, as well as several technology companies. With online grocery projected to account for 20% of all grocery by 2025, Kroger is likely trying to position itself as a viable grocer both online and in-store.”

    How AI and robots are eating desperately needed jobs in India
    • “By now it is a statement of fact that automation will take a hefty 30 percent bite out of the sector’s workforce of around two million while largely preserving the profit margins of these companies.
    • Almost all of them — Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Cognizant — have slashed jobs in India and are hiring less in the country while snapping up more workers in the US and investing large amounts of money there in “centers of innovation.” The hot new areas of AI and data sciences require fewer bodies and are mostly found overseas so this isn’t helping the prospects of domestic tech employees.”