What You Need to Know About Shopping Trends

The last two weeks have seen some significant dates in the retail calendar, culminating in the Thanksgiving sales. Considered the start of the Christmas shopping period, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have traditionally been the biggest shopping days in America. But why do we care here in Australia.

It’s simple. Every year it seems more and more Australian retailers are taking part in these promotions. In fact, this year the Australian Bureau of Statistics is predicting that retail sales in November will in fact be higher than those in December. The reason? Black Friday, Singles Day and Click Frenzy, who recently received over 2 million hits to their website during their November event.

But if the flood of emails you received in the last two weeks isn’t enough to convince you should take part in 2019, these statistics from Adobe Analytics should. Covering 80% of the largest retail businesses in America, they offer a fantastic insights to both shopping and e-commerce trends that are likely to impact your winery.

Black Friday Shopping Trends

• Sales on Black Friday grew by 28% to 3.7 billion.
• However, the sales weren’t happening in store. Sales in store actually fell by 4 – 7% in the US and similar numbers were reported in the UK.

What does this mean for you?This is also a timely reminder that you need to maximise the experience of customers who do visit you. Take a look at your cellar door and see what improvements you could make to the customer experience or how you could grow average purchase amounts.  

Cyber Monday Shopping Trends

•  Americans spent 95 million hours shopping for sales that totalled 7.9 billion. This makes it the single largest e-commerce shopping day ever, topping the record set in 2017 by more than 19%.
• The biggest sales drivers on Cyber Monday were tied between direct website traffic and email marketing (both at 25.9%) followed by paid search (21.6%) and organic search (21.1%).

What does this mean for you? e-Commerce remains a huge driver of sales but how do you get people to your website? Our recommendation is to focus on collecting emails from your cellar door customers. Not only does this give you a larger database to contact during a sale, regular contact will keep you front of mind and increase the likelihood of them visiting your website directly. 

e-Commerce Shopping Trends

• Smartphones accounted for 54.4% of traffic to retail sites and 36.7% of all sales across the weekend. In 2017, the percentage of traffic from mobile phones was only 46.1%. In addition to this, on Cyber Monday alone, over 50% of sales came from smartphones.

• Shipping methods are changing, with 65% growth year on year for customers buying online but electing to pick it up in store.

 What does this mean for you? It is crucial that your website is mobile friendly. Consider not only your layout and navigation, but also load times as this may vary on phones. Also, don’t forget to check it on as many different phones as possible. If you can’t easily put through an order, it’s likely your customers can’t either.

While pick up for deliveries is unlikely to be a concern for many wineries, it is worth looking at your current shipping policies to make sure they are in line with other industries as well as other wineries. Consider both the cost and speed of your delivery here.