Recent Articles
Cyber Monday Wrap Up – Great Results for eTailers!
We took a look at Black Friday trends this holiday season, and now we present to you our findings about Cyber Monday.
Peter Christian Looks to Expansion in the United States
We take a look at one of our United Kingdom customers, and introduce you to Peter Christian Outfitters, as they embark into the Unite Sates.
Black Friday Numbers: Mobile Leads the Way!
The results are coming in and retailers had an extra helping of cheer this week as Black Friday 2017 looks to have set new records. We saw a continuation of the trend that has changed Black Friday from a single day to a weeklong event, consumers have been trained to look for bargains beginning at least a week before the day itself Over the next week we will be pulling the sales numbers and publishing them here for you to consider as you build out your strategy for the remainder of the Holiday sales season Let’s take it from the top: Combined sales for Thanksgiving and Black Friday were up 17.9% from a year ago and total revenue was $7.9Billion Estimates are that consumers will spend as much as $19.7 Billion online in the five days from Thanksgiving thru Cyber Monday Mobile devices accounted for more than 61% of traffic to retail sites and 46% of sales according to Adobe If you would like to take a deep dive into the numbers here are two great articles from Digital Commerce
How Carbon2Cobalt Transformed Their Mobile eCommerce Business
Success is one of my favorite types of stories and I am happy to announce that we have released a terrific success story about Carbon2Cobalt, a M.O.M and SiteLINK customer. The Carbon2Coabalt team came to us with two goals: They were about to kick off their line of Women’s clothing and wanted to improve the online shopping experience for their customers yet keep their brand esthetic strongly aligned to their sales platforms Specifically, they saw a need to respond to the trend toward sales originating on mobile devices and to increase traffic and conversions across all platforms The result of the collaboration between our teams is a beautify redesigned site that supports Carbon2Cobalt’s brand and has increased sales. The result is best summed up in this quote by Bill Cuttler, Carbon2Cobalt’s COO: “I was overjoyed with the level of expertise and innovation brought to us by the Freestyle Solutions team. Not only did they do the things we asked, but they added great ideas that we hadn’t initially considered.” To learn more about the success Carbon2Cobalt is enjoying and to
eCommerce: How to Keep Customers Happy by Making Returns a Breeze This Holiday Season
Why not make this coming return season (Dec 26 through Jan 15…and beyond) your golden opportunity to build customer loyalty? During the holiday surge, a flood of orders originates from all different channels: including online shopping carts, postal mail order forms, inbound calls to customer service centers and physical points of purchase at brick and mortar store locations. As we’ve discussed in this blog series, an integrated order processing, inventory management, and shipping system puts you in a perfect position to profit by following back office system best practices. But let’s not forget that, after the holidays, some of those flawlessly stocked and shipped items are coming back. In fact, according to an NRF report, 75% of last year’s (2016) holiday shoppers checked a merchant’s return policies before making a purchase. Happily, over 80% described the return process as somewhat or very easy. Bottom line? This sets the bar very high for your own returns handling processes. Here are 5 ways you can streamline your return policy to make it seamless and easy, for customers and for you. #1 Define effective
Save Time & Money – Prepare for Seasonal Warehouse Order Surges
As a busy eCommerce retailer, you’re probably acutely aware of the “Monday Rush.” Those orders that have been accumulating since they were completed and paid for on your eCommerce platform Friday afternoon, all day Saturday, all day Sunday AND early Monday morning. Now it’s “Monday Rush” AM and your warehouse staff is faced with their biggest pick, pack and ship day of the week. What’s even worse is the 3-day weekend “Tuesday Rush." Add in the upcoming “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday” and the rest of the upcoming holiday seasonal rush, and it's easy to see how bogged down warehouse systems can get! Well, thank heavens for your experienced warehouse workers. They know what they’re doing, they're very familiar with your product and they know the layout of your warehouse. They’ve been through a lot of Monday or Tuesday Rushes, and you have a high level of confidence that the backlog of orders will get out the door with little or no errors. Besides, you probably pay them more for this extra knowledge and experience, right? But the fact is: even