The five-day span between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday are easily the busiest consumer shopping days in the US, and our merchants have plenty to celebrate this year! SearchSpring’s largest customers raked in over $35 million in sales during the Thanksgiving week “retail super bowl,” and some even saw conversion rates skyrocket to 24%! Many retailers saw sharp spikes in traffic that would make even a veteran IT department sweat. Thanks to clever planning, key hires and infrastructure investments, SearchSpring kept sites humming with fast response times, even during the busiest hours.
SearchSpring Top 100 Retailer Take-a-Ways
- Overall conversion rates increased 3x on average, meaning shoppers were more motivated to buy during Thanksgiving week.
- Number of items sold increased 10x to 50x for some retailers.
- Holiday traffic can spike 20x or higher very quickly creating challenges for IT.
- Shoppers who use site search are generally more ready to buy, converting 2.5x higher than shoppers who just browse.
- Black Friday conversion was 2.62x higher for shoppers using site search
- Cyber Monday conversion was 2.81x higher
- Average Order Value (AOV) for site search shoppers was 6.34% higher versus non-search shoppers
SearchSpring is an ecommerce site search provider and powers category and search result pages for hundreds of US retailers. Traffic across their network is representative of online shopping behavior across a variety of categories: apparel, books, housewares, health & nutrition, furniture & decor, sporting goods, just to name a few.
To better understand shopping behavior over the holiday weekend, SearchSpring's team analyzed traffic data to determine when shoppers were most active:
Interesting to note are the spikes at the end of the day on Thanksgiving as shoppers sought sneak peeks at Black Friday deals, as well as Cyber Monday, when last-minute shoppers gobbled up deals online before they expired. The uptick in traffic correlates with promotions, so it’s no surprise that retailers with physical stores tend to see online traffic peak around Black Friday, while “pure play” ecommerce retailers, or those that only operate online, saw traffic peak on Cyber Monday.
Creativity often helps marketers win over fickle consumers by creating promotions that make deals “feel” great. Some of the more successful offers include discounts on rarely marked down branded merchandise, free gifts with a purchase of a certain amount, or new items that were released specifically for the holidays. One retailer even offered rolling releases that featured new or discounted merchandise every few hours, keeping shoppers engaged and loyally returning for fresh deals.
Retailers with strong brands and aggressive holiday promotions lean on vendors like SearchSpring to help their sites scale during peak hours when traffic can skyrocket. Even big retailers with large IT departments and lots of planning are susceptible to disruptions or outages. Best Buy, Cabela's and Foot Locker all experienced technical issues stemming from drastic increases in traffic around Black Friday. Some of them were down for hours as they scrambled to resurrect sites for frustrated deal-seekers. Understanding online shopping behavior and preparing for sustained periods of high usage is essential to capitalizing on consumers' appetite for holiday deals.
SearchSpring was able to facilitate peak holiday traffic for its merchants, keeping response times fast and error rates low. During the holidays, keeping a site up and running is essential, and low response times can mean the difference between completed orders and shoppers abandoning their shopping session.
Understanding online consumer behavior is essential to increased holiday sales. Today, shoppers are teleported to and from storefronts within seconds on their desktop or mobile device. Creating a sales strategy and integrating the proper technology before the holiday rush is key to scaling with shopper demand and retaining loyal customers. SearchSpring specializes in capturing and leveraging key data points in the shopping life cycle to improve the shopping experience for everyone. For merchants, choosing the right vendors to work with is very important, as both technology and service play a huge role in making shoppers happy and spendy, it’s become far more than just creative merchandising and outbound promotions.
