Black Friday Cyber Monday – Sellers, Please Avoid The Stampede
A lot of e-commerce vendors plan meticulously for Black Friday. They create deep Black Friday/Cyber Monday discounts and spend 3X their normal advertising budget because shoppers are deal-hunting. For consumers and businesses alike, it’s a mad rush.
But, I won’t partake in the madness. Here’s why:
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Black Friday accounts for just 1-2% of annual e-commerce sales. The other 364 days account for the other 98%. Any Monday-Friday in summer give me more sales than Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
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Big discounts and increased ad spend means low-or-no profits, and potentially losses. Ads cost more than usual because everyone’s fighting to be seen. (They’re sold at auction.)
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Unless you sell $1,000 refrigerators or $500 TVs, Black Friday/Cyber Monday isn’t relevant to your business. Nobody is waiting all year to save 25% on a set of $13.99 camping cutlery.
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You’ll likely enjoy a 50-100% increase in sales without doing anything, and these sales will be profitable.
The largest reason to avoid the Black Friday/Cyber Monday insanity is that it’s a distraction from long-term growth.
Systematizing a process to sell an additional 1% every day is equivalent to enjoying a 365% jump in sales for 1 day. It is also a long-term increase in profitable sales, systematized for all future products, implemented on your schedule.
More important than Black Friday/Cyber Monday, focus on the year-round fundamentals:
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High Quality Products
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Improved Marketing Materials
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Smart Pricing
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Avoiding Stock-Outs
Doing these things right should increase your sales by much more than 1% per day, and will provide longer-term benefits than buying more advertising and giving 30% discounts on Black Friday/Cyber Monday.