The official date for Black Friday this year is November 26th. We’re not even out of October yet, and some retailers have already started to sell items at sale price. How has Black Friday gone from what was a one-day, mad-rush shopping sale to making it into a season that lasts several weeks, and now, months?
Here’s a bit of history about how Black Friday has gotten to where it is now, what the trends have been over the last few years, and their sales performance. We also cover what you as a retailer can do to capture the imminent hordes of online shoppers hungry for sales and bargains this holiday shopping season.
Before online catalogs, you might have either distributed print ones or used PDFs. But how consumers discover your fashion label has changed a lot. And now, rather than only window shopping on the high street, shoppers often look on online channels first for inspiration and ideas.
Fashion brands that have an online presence often use a combination of visual commerce and storytelling to illustrate to their audience what their individual look is and what it represents.
Among other eCommerce fashion marketing techniques, our customers who have a fashion brand have published online catalogs with us to provide a robust and inspirational online brand discovery experience for their target audience.
So, if you're a fashion label in need of some ideas for your catalog, you've come to the right page. Here are six fashion brands that publish online catalogs with Publitas.
The security of your content and data is of paramount importance if you want to remain a trusted brand in the eyes of your customers. We appreciate the lengths you go to maintain your status as a legitimate and safe web entity for all of your stakeholders.
We maintain exceptional security standards — certified with the highly recognized and trusted ISO 27001 — and use reputable web hosts whose attitudes and values towards content and browser security parallel our own.
Using third-party tools on your website can be a risky endeavor, so we've made this post to give you some insight into how we keep yours and our content secure. We aim to ensure that when you host content on our platform or embed our technology into yours, you aren't compromising the security of your digital assets.
Last year was the first time that eCommerce sales for the November holiday season in the US reached $100 billion (including Black Friday and Cyber Monday).
In 2020, online retailers promoted holiday season gifts and deals earlier than ever; to avoid crowded stores during the heat of the pandemic, many American consumers started their holiday shopping as early as October.
And as we reported last year, we still expect shoppers to start their holiday season shopping early this year and for this to continue for the foreseeable future.
So, this holiday season, how can you convert the waves of shoppers that will very soon be flooding online channels with their search terms?
The answer is: with a great gift guide!
Read on if you're looking for gift guide inspiration and want to know why gift guides are valuable.
Data-driven decisions can significantly increase the conversion rates of your online channels, such as your website, online catalog, or sales emails.
For example, in your online catalog, you might want to A/B test two different CTAs for one of your products and analyze the performance data to determine which one results in the most clicks.
But when it comes to analyzing data, marketers are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of metrics, insights, and KPIs available.
So, it helps when you have a familiar way of consolidating the most important KPIs for your digital catalog and when insights are made clearer and easier to understand.
That’s why Publitas’ online catalogs integrate with popular analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, Data Studio, and Tag Manager.
Here’s an overview of how to configure your Publitas online catalog to work with these tools.
The COVID-19 pandemic has arguably been the biggest disruptor of consumer behavior since the beginning of the dot-com bubble; it shaped how businesses market, operate, and distribute their products and prompted businesses to become more customer-centric.
The food and beverage industry was no exception to any of these changes, and over the last 18 months, some grocery brands experienced record-breaking revenues.
Consumers who otherwise never would have used supermarkets’ home-delivery services found themselves googling “food delivery” and related terms, with worldwide search volumes reaching record highs in April of last year.
Unsurprisingly, food order delivery apps like Uber Eats, Just Eat, and Deliveroo saw record-breaking order numbers, reaching $26.5 billion in sales revenue in the US alone.
And interestingly, two years before the pandemic, in 2018, a joint study conducted by the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) and NielsenIQ predicted that 70% of consumers would be grocery shopping online — perhaps that percentage is now even higher.
This shift in consumer behavior towards shopping for food and beverages online, instead of only at brick-and-mortar stores, has caused permanent changes in the way shoppers discover and buy groceries; the pandemic has paved the way for the digitally-engaged food shopper.
Grocery shoppers expect food shopping to be omnichannel, prompting supermarkets and convenience store chains to embrace the blending of on- and offline shopping experiences.
Supermarkets, DTC brands, and local food producers can engage with online browsers by serving them up inspiring content that resonates with their tastes, attitudes, and beliefs towards food and beverages.
And if done properly, grocery store content can leave food shoppers watering at the mouth, where they’ll want to see even more content, become a subscriber, and eventually a loyal customer.
So, what kind of content are leading grocery store brands leveraging to drive product discovery, and how can your brand use it to win more sales? Keep reading* to find out the latest trends.
*You’ve been warned — after reading, you’ll probably want a slice of the pie yourself (pun intended)!
(This is a guest post by Marcelo Cutini, sharing a quick overview of common interactive options available in online catalogs. You can find the original Spanish post here.)
Online catalogs allow you to overcome the limitations that are part of printing and distributing physical print media. For example, limitations on the number of pages or the form of delivery no longer exist.
There are also more creative possibilities when it comes to digital catalogs. The digital realm offers a broader range of options to increase the catalog's attractiveness and provide a much richer experience to the potential customer.
We'll go over some examples in this post, so make sure to read on if you want to know more.
Earlier we wrote about these six shopper profiles. But if you like things a bit more visual, today we're sharing an infographic with just the highlights. Read on for a quick summary of shopper types and their needs.
The product data on each channel you sell on must be kept up-to-date so that the customer shopping experience is consistent, with the same descriptions, pricing, or stock levels across all channels.
Most likely, you’ve managed this with a product feed file. And when your product inventory was smaller or your eCommerce store had just launched, you might have been editing and updating your data feed manually. But if your product catalogs have grown too big, you need a quicker, more efficient, and effective method.
You’ve also got to make sure that your product feed is of the correct format so that your product data is readable on different marketplaces or channels; usually, this will be a CSV, XML, or TXT file type.
Not only that, but if you want to deliver high-performance marketing campaigns across different product marketing channels like Amazon, Google, or Facebook — your product data needs to be optimized to appear in search results.
The best way to efficiently and successfully manage these mission-critical technicalities is by using a product feed automation tool (aka product feed manager, product feed integrator, or product feed aggregator).
In this post, we go over how a feed manager can help and what to look for. We also share a few good feed managers that work with Publitas.
The world of eCommerce and digital experiences wouldn't be complete without their buzzwords, and there are always new ones to learn about. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it's an excellent place to get started if you want to explore some of the latest topics and terminology in eCommerce shopping experiences.
(Plus, we link to some great resources if you want to know more about specific topics!)