TORONTO, Oct. 09, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GroupBy Inc., a leading provider of relevancy-focused eCommerce solutions, today announced its projections for the 2018 Cyber Weekend, estimating its own retail customers will capture a total of $420M during the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday of this year, based on historical analysis from the company’s customer base.
Based on orders recorded for this year, GroupBy expects to capture $9.35B of transactions for all of 2018. Adobe Analytics reported American consumers spent $19.62B online during the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday of 2017. To estimate, the approximately $20B in sales during this period accounts for 4.5% of the $448B annual sales for the year. Given this calculation, 4.5% of GroupBy’s forecasted $9.35B in annual sales comes to $420M*.
With 2017’s online sales during these five days increasing by $2.6B, or 15%, compared with 2016, according to a Practical Ecommerce sales report, GroupBy offers a few initial tips for how retailers can prepare in anticipation of the holidays based on the expected transaction numbers:
Comprehensive Product Data
With the volume of online purchases continuing to increase, ensuring product data is both comprehensive and complete, especially during the holiday sales crunch period, is vital. The barrier of the screen means no touching, feeling or trying on products, making accurate and detailed product descriptions an important source of reliability. What’s more, enhanced descriptions make products more findable to site visitors, ultimately increasing conversion rates, decreasing returns and bolstering customer loyalty.
Personalizing the Online Shopping Experience
Given that a direct correlation exists between shopper experience and increased conversion rates, customers are much more likely to explore a site longer and purchase more items when they feel the shopping experience has been created for them. Retailers can cater to this need by implementing Personalization, Product Recommendations, Search As You Type (SAYT) and Dynamic Navigation solutions. Retailers who commit to understanding what their customers are interested in, what they’re in the market for and what they’re most likely to add to their cart and purchase will reap the benefits when sales spike during the holidays.
Analytics for regular health check
As well, using analytics to evaluate a shopper’s responses to your company’s is another component to maximizing sales. Sophisticated business intelligence tools such as interactive dashboards and regular health checks allow retailers to track their progress and have real-time insight into operational performance.
“As retailers prepare for the upcoming holiday sales season, improving site search capabilities should be at the forefront of their strategies”, said GroupBy CEO Roland Gossage. “Each of our clients bring thousands of new products to the table, with some affixed data. Now it’s our job to search out the gaps in this data and deploy strategies to fill them, resulting in proper classifications, increased product findability and more relevant search results. In order to achieve this—taking good product data to greatness—we combine the very best of manual curation with cutting edge machine learning technology.”
*Methodology
GroupBy arrived at this estimate by taking the following data into consideration:
- The estimate is based on the assumptions that the order data covers all customers and that all orders are valid.
- According to U.S. retail data, $448B in online sales occurred throughout 2017.
About GroupBy Inc.
GroupBy Inc. transforms the way retailers interact with their consumers online through data-driven commerce, media, and knowledge management software solutions. The company supports the online retail efforts of many of the world’s leading online retailers by driving more targeted site traffic and increases in revenue through its platform Searchandiser. GroupBy’s solutions provide industry-leading features for data enrichment, search, navigation, merchandising, search engine optimization (SEO) and search as you type (SAYT). Founded in 2014, GroupBy is headquartered in Toronto, Canada and has offices around the world. For more information, please visit www.groupbyinc.com.
Media Contact
Mikaela Cannizzo
Ketner Group Communications (for GroupBy)
mikaela@ketnergroup.com
512-794-8876