Tag: Cyber Monday

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.

    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

    AI eCommerce News – Nov 9th

    ~ Brandon McGee ~ Leave a comment

    Ecommerce Report: Cyber Monday 2017 Is Expected To Be “TheLargest Online Shopping Day In History”
    • “Web traffic on smartphones and tablets will, for the first time, surpass desktop (at 54 percent and 46 percent respectively).
    • Mericle’s points about creating “easy shopping experiences” and “providing a seamless customer journey” are especially important in the ecommerce space, where more and more retailers are leveraging AI-powered customer engagement platforms to create individualized digital shopping experiences.”

    Dreamforce 2017 – Adidas hits the ground running with AIe-commerce app
    • “Away from kitting the CEO, Adidas used Dreamforce to launch a new AI-enabled shopping app designed to offer a personalized experience for consumers, based on their individual style and buying patterns. To pay for items, customers can tap-to-buy, using a credit card or digitally via Apple Pay or Android Pay.
    • Once a purchase has been made, the customer can track their order, and chat with customer services regarding it. Such chats will intially be with a human being, but within a few months, Adidas will introduce chat bots to handle simple queries, with human intervention only when things get more complicated to deal with.
    • From Adidas perspective, the important thing is that the app’s AI capabilities will learn as it goes. From interaction with a consumer, the app will pick up more and more data about what he or she likes and doesn’t like and start to make recommendations, encouraging upsell opportunities.
    • With the power of the Service Platform and Einstein built in, when you talk to those agents, they’re smarter and more productive than ever before. Einstein bots are transforming the world of service. They are the ultimate helper. Using Salesforce Einstein bots to power their service interactions, Adidas is able to do everything. It is able to handle all those repetitive tasks, those actions, whether you want to make a return, or you want to exchange something.”

    How is Artificial Intelligence Going to Change the Face of E-commerce?
    • “AI can predict customer behaviour better than human. It allows companies to create a more personalized experience for customers and better engagement for sellers.
    • Many artificial intelligence systems enable natural language learning and voice input. That means that CRM system can answer to customer queries or solve their problems.
    • AI is going to play a large role in the sales process, through the entire sales process and buyer’s journey.”


    POWERING MARKETING WITH AI TO BOOST REVENUE
    • “Join us on Thursday, Nov. 16 at 2 pm EST/11 am PST for “The Rise of the AI-Empowered Marketer: Engaging Smarter to Grow Revenue,” a free live webinar, where we’ll explore what you need to know about AI for marketing success.”

    Consider These 3 Benefits of Using AI in Ecommerce
    • “Research firm, Forrester, predicts that online sales will skyrocket to $459 billion in 2017, totaling 12.9 percent of retail sales.
    • The vast majority of merchants, however, spend a significant portion of their time just trying to figure out how to compete with Amazon. Understandably so, considering that the retail behemoth is poised to garner nearly half of all online sales this year.
    • In an effort to contend, many retailers are trying to set themselves apart by creating deeply personal and highly curated experiences online. Most of these are powered by AI technology.”

    Intelligent Agents: An A.I. View of Optimization
    • “Go to any industry conference, blog, meet up, or even just read the popular press, and you will hear and see topics like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics everywhere.
    • Because many of us don’t come from a technical/statistical background, this can be both a little confusing and intimidating.
    • But don’t sweat it, in this post, I will try to clear up a some of this confusion by introducing a simple, yet powerful framework – the intelligent agent – which will help link these new ideas with familiar tools and concepts like A/B Testing and Optimization.”