Every year, e-commerce sales continued to skyrocket during the big holiday shopping days following Thanksgiving. And this year was no different.
On Black Friday 2012, plenty of deals were available online that kept buyers from going out into the cold in the middle of the night and waiting on long lines. This year saw a 26 percent increase over last year’s online sales during the same promotion, according to ComScore. Black Friday’s Internet retail totaled more than $1 billion, up from $816 million last year. That included a 29 percent growth in sales of subscriptions to online content or digital products, like music. Amazon.com was this year’s top-seller, with WalMart.com coming in second.
Some analysts began to speculate that such a surge in online shopping on Black Friday could hurt traffic on Cyber Monday, which is typically reserved for big online discounts. However, this date also saw a 30.3 percent increase from 2011. Amazon.com saw a majority of online bargain-hunters, especially those seeking the latest Kindle.
If your business has products or services available for sale online, you should consider taking part in the overwhelmingly popular practice of offering discounts on Cyber Monday – and possible Black Friday as well. If you aren’t an e-commerce website, you can still take advantage of increased Web traffic on those dates by purchasing ads on websites that commonly see a boost in visitors. If you’re a small business without the buying power to create a Web presence on those big sales days, you can also consider putting your budget toward Small Business Saturday, which is overlooked by major competitors.
Furthermore, with people gravitating toward search websites like Google to find the best deals, it’s a good time of year to remember to check on your AdWords accounts and SEO efforts so that, should someone pause in their gift shopping to look up something else they’ve been meaning to purchase – whether it’s legal services or a local car repair shop – they can quickly locate your page.
Consider Thanksgiving week a time to check on how easy it is to locate your business online, how readable your pages are and how user-friendly the website itself is. See if your sales go up — and if not, what can you do next year to monetize your website and take advantage of the Web traffic increase on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?