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By Dalia Abutteen

Are your sales calendars marked for the biggest shopping event of the year? We sure hope so! The emails, messages, ads, and push notifications are already flooding the internet, as every online retailer tries to stand out in the midst of the virtual crowd. eCommerce businesses around the world are carefully preparing their sites and perfecting their marketing strategies to boost their sales on this date. What about consumers? Well, they are cancelling plans, bringing their credit cards and e-wallets out, and getting ready to find the best bargains for items on their wish lists!

Black Friday/White Friday is a really exciting time for everybody, but we understand how stressful it can be for retailers trying to put together the best deals to maximize sales. In an attempt to help out, we put together a list of the best marketing tactics you can easily apply in time for the big day. But first, let’s answer a few questions you might have. If you are already familiar with the big event of the year, you may skip to the list.

What is White Friday?

White Friday is another term for the famous Black Friday that emerged from the United States, and now is globally known as the biggest online shopping event. Every year, around this time, almost every ecommerce site starts preparing for Black Friday (White Friday in the Middle East), which takes place annually during the last Friday of November and usually extends to the last few days of the month.

When is White Friday in 2020?

White Friday will officially start on November 27, 2020.

Although White Friday comes in pandemic-style this year, with e-commerce booming and consumer behaviors changing, we expect it to be a huge success for all online retailers.

Four Marketing Tips to Boost Your White Friday Sales

1. Optimize Your Site Banner for Better Conversions

Create a flashy White Friday banner on your website or app with carefully crafted messaging that positions your business as the absolute go-to for the biggest deals of the year. Link the banner to a separate landing page with the special “White Friday Discounted Products” to simplify the browsing experience for your customers.

Bonus tip: some retailers are adding a countdown clock that creates more urgency to buy before time is up, with messages such as “Hurry, time is running!” or “Hurry, white Friday sale ends in X number of hours!”

2. Offer Irresistible Deals and Display Them Correctly

Sprii online store is planning to offer discounts up to 90% during the black friday dubai version! Now you are probably wondering, what would be considered a ‘Hot Deal’ and which products should be discounted?

a. Prepare a list of your most popular products, the best-sellers, and knock down their prices to give customers an irresistible bargain on the items they have been anticipating to buy.

b. You can benefit from cross-selling if those discounted products require other complementary items available on your website.

c. When displaying your White Friday deals make sure to show the original price and highlight the exact savings percentage to motivate buyers to click that “add to cart” button.

Bonus tip: Offer free shipping, it almost always works in speeding up the buying decision!

3. Hype Up Your Social Media Channels

You nailed your promotions strategy and optimized your site, but how do you create hype around your big sales to keep your customers engaged even before the big event?

a. Leverage all your active social media channels, and start giving followers a sneak peek into your Black Friday sale early on

b. Create content that features the products that will go on sale so customers can start adding them to their shopping lists ahead of time

c. Increase your social media ad spending to expand your reach and maximize your sales possibilities

d. Stay active all the time, answer all questions quickly, and engage with your potential customers as much as possible throughout the entire online shopping event

Bonus tip: Create a Facebook Event for your white Friday sale 2020 with a start and end date, and invite many people to it to keep them posted on all updates fast!

4. Personalize White Friday Emails to Increase Click Rates

First, it’s important to mention that your subscribers’ inboxes are probably flooded with advertising emails from e-commerce businesses promoting their Black Friday sales offers. So, keep your content short and straight to the point by mentioning in bold the big discounts and deals you are offering, with a very clear call-to-action leading them to your products page, (and then hopefully to the checkout page).

One of the proven ways to cut through the noise during White Friday and boost engagement, is to send out personalized emails to your subscribers, promoting special offerings and relevant recommendations tailored to their preferences, using the insights and history collected when they visited your website.

And definitely, don’t underestimate the power of retargeting lost customers through email. Whenever an indecisive customer abandons their cart, send a teaser email that will woo them back in to complete the purchase.

Bonus tip: The secret behind a high click rate is in crafting a catchy “Subject Line”! For Black Friday Emails, it’s best to include the limited-time deal you are offering in the subject line.

Finally, we recommend extending the sale a couple of days past White Friday, as this is quite common amongst retailers in the Middle East.

These were some of the few essential tips to help you gain traffic and take advantage of all the possible opportunities to maximize your sales during this annual online shopping event. However, the tactics are numerous, keep researching, testing, and leveraging all marketing strategies to stand out from the competition. Follow our blog on Hyperpay for more useful and informative articles covering ecommerce challenges and market trends along with payment solutions customized to meet their needs.

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First came the computer, and then came the mobile. Then there was the internet, then there was the smartphone, and now we have these apps. It’s hard to keep up with technology when every day there’s a new invention. You might think it’s easier not to, but trust me it’s not. Someday, technology’s going to catch up with you, leaving you no choice but to submit to its authority. And whether you’re ready for it or not, you’re going to have to embrace it. The good news is, it’s actually not that bad, and it can do miracles to your online business. Today, the number of mobile users is larger than the number of desktop users. Why do you think that it? People are highly embracing the mobile app trend and offering them a mobile website does not provide the same experience.

What Makes a Mobile App Better Than a Mobile Website?

1- Extra features: Mobile apps have a number of features you can utilize for your app. Such as camera, contact list, GPS, phone calls, compass, etc… These features can make your user experience more interactive and fun. Not to mention, they can significantly shorten the time needed to perform certain tasks.

2- No restrictions on functions: Mobile websites, no matter how advanced, still have some limitations on certain functions. However, this problem doesn’t exist with mobile apps. Simple functions can make a huge difference in your life, like the swipe, or drag, or zoom in functions.

3- Ability to work offline: Perhaps one of the best features about mobile apps is the ability to work offline. This feature alone puts apps way ahead of mobile websites. Even though you might not be able to perform all the tasks without an internet connection. You can still get a lot done using the offline mode.

4- Improved productivity and customer service: Mobile apps allow you to track your customers’ purchases and better understand their shopping trends. This gives you the upper hand as you can stock their favorite items in advance so you’ll never run out-of-stock. You will be able to predict their next shopping cart and meet your delivery schedule. On-time business processes and meeting customer demand mean more sales.

5- Increased profit: Mobile apps are easy to use; this encourages customers to keep browsing your products. The speed factor also results in time saving and more purchases. In addition, for customers to be able to be able to set their preferences is highly important. Simple personalized information such as interests, location, and more can help you customize their recommendations. Ultimately, this will lead to higher conversion rates.

The bottom line is…Mobile apps are crucially important for your online store. People spend most of their time on mobile apps because they hold the power to simplify every single detail of their lives into a mobile app. Not to mention, their shopping behavior and decision making. Mobile apps can offer greater values to your business, all you need to do is convince your customers that your app’s worthy of their time.

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A Free Guide to Choosing The Right Shopping Cart Platform

It’s the dreaded question, the one every starting eCommerce tries to avoid and leaves till the last minute. Which is the right shopping cart platform for my business? Lucky for you, we’re here to make your life easier. We’ve decided to make a research on shopping carts to help you make an informed decision. So we’ve gathered as much information as we could find on the most used platforms and created a list of pros and cons. But before getting into that, you need to understand the forms of modern shopping carts.

Shopping Cart Types:

A) Hosted Shopping Carts: Also known as SaaS (Software as a service). Easy-to-use, but limited in functionality because it’s hosted by your vendor. That’s why it’s recommended for eCommerce beginners. You might not be able to customize your site as preferred. Monthly fees include access to the software, hosting, and security.

B) Self-Hosted Shopping Carts: These are Open-Source solutions, they’re free to download and use. But you’ll need to find your own hosting and buy your own SSL certificate each year. On top of that, they’re much more difficult to operate than hosted solutions. Therefore, they’re not highly recommended for beginners. However, your developers can access every line of code in the software which gives you total freedom customizing your site. You can also use pre-paid add-ons and themes.

Top Shopping Cart Platforms…Our Own Views And Comparison

The number one hosted shopping cart with over 100,000 online stores. It’s ideal for small or medium-sized businesses and eCommerce.

Pros: This platform is extremely easy to setup with well-designed templates to choose from. It includes an iOS App for updating your store, managing inventory, orders, and contacting customers. POS system is available allowing you to sync both online and offline inventory and sales.

Cons: It’s not cheap and as you have more sales, your monthly plan becomes more and more expensive. Not to mention that you have limited control over your checkout page design. On top of that, the built-in blog is weak compared to WordPress.

It’s a self-hosted platform owned by eBay. Best for an enterprise-class eCommerce, due to its long experience in the field.

Pros: It offers customer support features to help handle millions of customer queries. It also includes an extension marketplace where users can integrate a number of third-party tools such as WordPress, Zendesk, and others. Another benefit is that its customizing charges vary as per your developer.

Cons: It’s difficult to customize with an unfriendly user interface. But perhaps the biggest issue with Magento is low speed. Even though slow performance is a problem you can fix, you shouldn’t have to. Moreover, you need to install an extension for blogging.

A self-hosted platform owned by WordPress now. Known best for its plug-ins and ideal for average and smaller stores that just need a store to sell a few things right.

Pros: Free and easy to install with an unlimited customizing ability and resources. If you already have a WordPress site, all you need to do is to install the free plug-in. You can access millions of free and prepaid themes. You can also enjoy all WordPress features, like the blog which is very well-organized.

Cons: Security is a huge issue as WordPress is a highly hacked platform. Plugin updates can break other plugins, or the shopping cart altogether. You have limited credit card gateway choices with a very weak support system which may take more than 24 hours to respond. So unless you have a full-time developer to maintain your website, don’t take the risk.

A hosted platform with clients like CNN, the Food Network, ABC News, GQ and others.

Pros: It integrates with eBay, Facebook, Shopzilla, and PriceGrabber. It accepts payments from a variety of gateways including PayPal and Google Checkout. It offers a fully-loaded package that includes a secure shopping cart, product catalogs, payment gateway, marketing tools, and a mobile-optimized store. The user interface of the admin panel looks clean and easy to navigate.

Cons: It starts considerably cheap, then increases its fees over time without you noticing. It’s fairly customizable but without total control and has terrible customer service.

A self-hosted platform with a growing community of store owners, developers, and service providers.

Pros: It integrates with a variety of payment processors like Amazon, eBay, and Sagepay. Over 7,000 add-ons that enable you to customize and add new functionalities to your online storefronts. Price varies per developer.

Cons: Difficult to edit with many security issues.

A self-hosted shopping cart.

Pros: Easy one-click upgrades. Always on top of the latest trends and technology. Search-engine friendly and integrates with many of the third-party applications. Multilingual capabilities.

Cons: No built-in POS system. Considered expensive.

This is a self-hosted platform on the rise.

Pros: It has one of the cleanest interfaces of all default themes with a good set of features. In addition, it’s easy to edit and has many integrated payment and shipping options.

Cons: Limited features with no customization. It has SEO issues and it’s not suitable for large scale businesses.

Let’s recap…

No matter what shopping cart you choose, you’ll never start with one that fits all your needs. Narrow down your top priorities and pick the shopping cart that addresses at least 75% of your needs. Consider your budget and take your time before finally making your decision. But most importantly, understand what your business needs out of a shopping cart. Watch demos of your short-listed shopping carts, ask a lot of questions, and test before using.

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Critical Factors To Consider Before Making The Final Decision

Why are you creating an online store? Are you looking to sell a few items or are you hoping to build the next eCommerce empire? Is the shopping cart easy to set-up and use? Is it customizable? Does it have a built-in SEO feature? Does it support multi-currencies and multilingual? Is it compatible with third-party applications like my merchant account and payment gateway? Does this shopping cart have a timely support and maintenance service? What payment methods does it support? Are there any transaction limitations? Is it possible to integrate it with a physical store’s data, operations, and resources?

Your success depends on having the right tools at your disposal. This includes a suitable shopping cart and a trustworthy payment gateway. Have you made your decision yet? Which is your favorite shopping cart? Let us know in the comments section. 

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Knowledge in eCommerce is a very powerful weapon that can hold your success hostage indefinitely. Sadly, most people go into business without knowing the first thing about eCommerce. Some of them might know but may not comprehend just how important small issues like content generation, shopping cart, and email marketing can be. Simple things can help your website generate more views and eventually make more sales. So what can you do to ensure having a successful online business? What are the challenges that you may face and how can you fix or avoid them altogether?

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The Biggest Challenges Faced in eCommerce and how to overcome them

1- Low website traffic

Lack of visitors can be caused by a number of things. People could be searching for your products but are unable to find your website, or they can be browsing your website but are not making a purchase.

Solution: Google Analytics can be very effective here, it helps you identify your problems, whether they were content related or design related. Social media is also great for exposure, it helps you direct people to your website.

2- Cart abandonment

This happens when customers are persuaded to buy but for some reason, they don’t go through with the purchase. It could be related to a lack of trust, it could also relate to complicated checkout processes or unnecessary requirements.

Solution: Make your checkout process as easy as possible. Clarify everything to your customers from the beginning, like your shipping costs, your refund policy, etc. Think about the details you actually need from your customers, don’t ask for more than you need.

3- Trust issues:

How do you build trust between your customer and your brand when the only type of communication happens behind a screen?

Perhaps this is the biggest challenge of all. Reasons for the lack of trust can vary between content, extra costs, policies, security, etc.

Solution: Starting with honest product descriptions and clear images taken from different angles. Product reviews are very important here, even if they were negative don’t remove them from your website, this shows honesty in your brand. Make your contact information very clear on every page. Customers need to trust that your website is legit and that they have someone to contact if needed. Have a clear return and exchange policy stated on your website along with the costs and your privacy policy. It also helps to list the names of your staff with pictures and bios, this makes customers feel more comfortable. As for the security issue, you need to get fraud-monitoring tools and comply with Level 1 PCI DSS security standard.

4- Verification Measures

When customers sign up to an eCommerce website, they need to enter their information. The problem is, you can’t be sure of the information you get, the credibility of the customers is questionable.

Solution: Validation emails will do the trick. All you have to do is send out email messages to customers to validate their identities. And when a purchase is made, the customer should receive a call to confirm the delivery address.

5– Delay in communication

Customers enjoy assistance before, during, and after they make a purchase. This is where brick and mortar businesses exceed eCommerce. Online shopping makes customer service harder as there’s no instant or direct line of communication.

Solution: Have a clear FAQs page where customers can find all the answers they need. Sizing charts are very important as well, they help your customers choose pieces that fit them perfectly. Offer a proper ticketing system with 24-hour customer support.

Success takes time, in eCommerce it usually takes double the time so you need to be very patient. Setting up your website and maintaining it will consume a lot of your time and effort, so be prepared for that. The good news is we are happy to help you in any way we can.

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