Although reports state that the holiday shopping season showed a 6 percent rise on Thanksgiving day and a 15 percent rise on Cyber Monday, they also state that the total holiday online retail sales had dropped 3 percent. This is not a big number but it is the first time that online retail sales have shown a drop and compared to a 19% rise in 2007 and 25 % in 2006, it is pretty significant. This has been blamed on a short shopping period after thanksgiving and before Christmas, and also on customer cutbacks due to the economic crisis.
Now we can follow along with the rest of the e-commerce community and completely ignore this fact. It is hardly being mentioned anywhere and everyone is trying to play the optimistic role and disregard the “bad news” which will not help with solving anything. But there’s another way of being optimistic; a way which does not involve overlooking the facts.
Yes the economic crisis has forced people to cutback but like always there are those that disprove the majority against all odds. How about instead of ignoring what just happened, use it as an advantage to get exposed to the working strategies.
Wal-Mart was one of the retailers gaining from customer cutbacks due to price competition. But another retailer who was experiencing increased sales was Amazon. The great lesson to be learnt from Amazon is the capability of always coming up with creative strategies where people would end up following in their footsteps. Following up with a good strategy is not the same as coming up with better ones. For an example of one of their neat and simple tricks take a look at how they upgraded between their Better together and Bundle strategies.
Last but not least, if you’ve accepted that it is better to be creative yourself rather than following up on second hand strategies, there’s an outline of a great book called Predictably Irrational that I found very informative regarding the ways that a customer thinks which are not very logical. This information can be very useful for coming up with many new ways of handling issues that don’t usually come into mind.