Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) have become the centerpiece of many brands’ ecommerce calendar - offering unprecedented opportunities for online retailers to boost sales, attract new customers, and move inventory. According to a survey by the National Retail Federation, retailers can earn approximately 20% of their annual sales during the Black Friday to Christmas shopping period.
BFCM by the Numbers
Data from 2023 showed a record-setting turnout of 200.4 million shoppers during Cyber Week in the USA. This massive influx of digital consumers translated into $9.8 billion in online sales during Black Friday and $12.4 billion in online sales during Cyber Week alone, marking a 9.6% year-over-year increase in the United States. All told, Black Friday accrued $70.9 billion globally in 2023, which is an 8% year-over-year increase.
In addition to the surge of demand during this tight holiday window, brands have offered earlier offerings and expanded the sales period to encourage a longer shopping period enabling end consumers to allocate more towards holiday purchases. Amazon Prime Day (which occurs twice a year and is their branded version of BFCM) earned $14.2 Billion globally in 2024.
This trend was compounded further in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for e-commerce growth, with BFCM sales seeing unprecedented spikes in 2020 and 2021. It was expected that there would be a significant downturn in BFCM sales as normal life resumed. The e-commerce sector however has shown remarkable resilience and continued global growth in the post-pandemic era:
2019 (Pre-COVID): Online BFCM sales reached $9.4 billion
2020 (Peak COVID): A surge to $10.8 billion, marking a 15% increase
2021: Further growth to $10.9 billion
2022: Continued expansion to $11.3 billion
2023: The aforementioned $12.4 billion, demonstrating sustained growth
BFCM Strategies
From all of the data available, it is clear BFCM is a massive opportunity for retail brands to earn huge sales, but with 26.6 million e-commerce sites globally, the competition for consumers has never been higher. To put that into perspective, there have been 2,685 e-commerce websites started each day in just 2023 and 2024. To be successful, you need a reliable and robust end-to-end commerce enablement strategy comprising both physical operations and digital technologies.
Unfortunately, the first truth about being prepared for BFCM is not a shocking or surprising insight - the brands that can regularly and repeatedly deliver their consumer’s orders on time with healthy margins are most likely to have the component parts to succeed during BFCM. If you cannot nail the basics on a random Tuesday in July, there is no reason to expect your systems will be capable of managing the massive spikes in demand while meeting consumer expectations.
Win Your Inventory. Bring Order To Your Orders.
While many will say the consumer journey starts with the marketing, which then drives to the website, that showcases the product, which pushes the cart to conversion, which finally ends with the product being delivered - at Stord we believe a successful consumer journey starts at correct inventory.
Without an effective inventory management system you lose the ability to accurately inform marketing what products exist that they can promote, you run the risk of overselling products that you cannot fulfill on your promised delivery date, and you create costly customer service issues to correct. Often, brands have had to manage their inventory decisions with batched inventory updates from their fulfillment partners. Meaning every several hours (or days) you get a snapshot of your current inventory. During a massive sales event with multiple sales channels these issues compound on each other creating a nightmare situation for your brand.
With accurate inventory data paired with a robust Order Management System (OMS) with real-time data, not only do these problems vanish, but new opportunities present themselves.
Now, brands can quickly analyze consumer behavior and identify the fastest moving products, ensuring you have ample inventory for BFCM. A modern OMS does this automatically, but this can be done by hand through an ABC prioritization methodology, which sorts inventory based on most to least critical items, you can see a free template here. But, if you manage your inventory data properly, you can also discover SKU affinity - basically what are the other products that are likely to be sold in tandem with your more desirable products. This not only ensures you have the inventory, but also informs your marketing team of potential kits or displays related items to be shown to a consumer before checkout. A truly savvy team could look at the buying habits based on region and identify related SKUs that speak to that area - if the consumer is in a colder climate during BFCM, you can suggest related SKUs that have both a high propensity of selling with your fast movers and are more desirable for that specific region.
This optimization based on your historical sales can be further enhanced by incorporating statistical models of projected sales, and planned marketing campaigns. This forward-thinking approach of inventory planning allows brands to more accurately order and geographically place inventory across their networks. Now, you can accurately predict how long your existing inventory will last, intelligently order replenishments, and adjust models to accommodate seasonal demand and marketing initiatives. No more languishing inventory hoping to be sold, or empty racks awaiting products you oversold to frustrated customers - just what you need, when you need it, and precisely where you need it.
Selling With Consumer Experience In Mind
A great consumer journey and experience may start with your inventory and order routing, but you cannot expect that alone to set your brand apart from the competition. While marketing teams can now confidently promote your products accurately, what happens when someone selects your products on your website and interacts with your shipping options for the first time?
Assuming you have already minimized the number of clicks a consumer must make to finalize a purchase AND that you have shifted your account creation to post-purchase (25% - 37% of online shoppers will abandon their cart due to account creation), let me share some sobering facts.
47% - 60% of online shoppers will abandon their cart due to higher shipping costs and fees.
23% abandon their cart due to unclear total order costs
18% - 24% abandon their cart because of slow shipping options
14% will abandon shopping with a retailer completely if they receive a late delivery just once
And perhaps most telling of all - according to Baymard Institute 70.19% of online shoppers will abandon their cart. Put another way, only 3 out of 10 customers will complete the purchase.
This clearly shows the necessity of having a clear shipping promise and cost AND that you must hit that promise. If you are powering your cart with a parcel and last-mile optimization solution, you can leverage your historical shipping data to implement estimated delivery dates. This means you can clearly show a potential shopper that the product they have in their cart will arrive on a precise date vs showing a carrier level like ground or a date range like 2-3 business days. This added clarity has been shown to boost conversion rates by 7%.
Hitting your promised delivery date means you need a competent fulfillment provider who has a robust catalog of local and national carriers to improve your parcel rates, flexibility, and protect against outages. Whether or not you charge your consumers for shipping is often a strategy call, but since transportation costs account for 58% or more of the total order fulfillment costs, having a system that can automatically downgrade based on the historical data of your zip code to zip code deliveries is a potential massive savings. Stord customers regularly see hundreds of thousands to over a million dollars in annual parcel savings with this strategic solution.
Accurately displaying your inventory and hitting your promised delivery dates builds long term customer confidence and loyalty. In addition though, you need to ensure you communicate this critical component to your consumers effectively.
Can you effectively send an email when they abandon their cart? Inform them when the package is labeled and picked up by the carrier? Inform them of any delays or split orders? What about instances of damage or theft upon delivery? Each one of these and more can be a failpoint in your communication, sowing doubt and mistrust within your consumer. Since 80% of porch piracy victims occur between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you cannot overlook your ability to communicate accurate information and provide easy self-service solutions to any issues encountered. One solution would be Shipment Protection, which powers an easy claims and resolution portal with automatic communication updates. Throughout every step an order takes to reach your end consumer, your brand should have automatic contingency plans to send updates and reinforce that brand trust. For example, if your OMS detects an odd delay (or dwelling) it can alert your fulfillment team to correct the issue and to your consumer to set proper expectations.
Prepare Prepare Prepare
In 2023, Stord followed these strategies on behalf of our customers and experienced the following:
260% increase in Black Friday order volume
261% increase in Cyber Monday sales
6x increase in average daily orders
48% increase in average order value on Black Friday
Put plainly more consumers were ordering, ordering larger amounts, and Stord was able to fulfill them on time in full. This ability to scale up operations to meet unexpected demand can be the difference between capitalizing on sales opportunities and disappointing customers with delays or stockouts. And we are prepared for an even larger and more successful BFCM in 2024.
Ultimately, all of these systems and tools allow brands to better partner with their marketing and sales teams to support their revenue goals while better preparing the operational teams to correctly and efficiently deliver every order to every customer on or before the promised delivery date at scale. So if it is Black Friday, Friday the 13th, or really any Friday in-between, these strategies will help you succeed this holiday season and every subsequent day.
Concerned about your Black Friday Cyber Monday preparedness? Let's chat and discuss how Stord can help you win in key sale periods!
