Holiday shopping season is here again! Just like 2020, sales this holiday season are forecast to reach new heights. According to a new report from Deloitte, holiday sales are set to increase by 9% compared to last year. With the e-commerce industry bracing for another year of record sales, it’s time to start navigating your business through the 2021 holiday period.
At Comestri, we’re here to help your business grow and prepare for the inflow of shoppers.
We’ve put together some preparation advice below to help you sail through the peak holiday season.
Manage sale Categories and sale pricing
Holiday shoppers are usually in a hurry. This means you need to ensure your online offers and promotions reach buyers when they’re ready to purchase by intelligently managing your sale Categories and pricing so there’s no chance of shopper hesitation.
As you’ll see below, Comestri’s Bulk Edits function allows you to automate the Category assignment and sale price generation tasks associated with promotional events.
Bulk Edits work by allowing you to apply the same action to multiple products simultaneously – helping you work smarter, and faster.
Ensure you have sale Categories set up early on
Holiday season can bring a lot of traffic to your e-commerce store. But adding new Categories just as the peak season starts can lead to errors, confusion for your customers and team, and an additional load on infrastructure during your busiest sales period.
To provide a smooth online shopping experience for your customers, you should confirm that sale Categories have been correctly mapped to your external sales platforms before the start of the holiday season. (For more details, see Set Up Category Mapping.)
Automate assignment of sale Categories to products
Assigning Categories to multiple products, individually, is easier said than done.
Using Comestri’s Bulk Assign Category Bulk Edit function, you can automate the process of assigning sale Categories to multiple products in one go to reduce the chance of mistakes and save valuable time. You can use the Bulk Assign Category along with Product Filters to look for products with a sale price and automatically assign relevant sale Categories to those products in the Comestri PIM.
Find and export a list of products without sale prices
At times, products might be missing a sale price when they are created in the Comestri PIM. Searching for these products individually can be tedious. There is also a chance you might miss a few products in the process.
Using the Product Filters and the Export Products function in the PIM, you can easily filter to a list of products without a sale price, then export this list of products as a CSV file so you can take further action. (For more details, see Export Products.)
Automate sale price creation with scheduled start-and-end dates
For a smooth sales promotion, the products in your sale Categories must have sale prices assigned to them. If you have a few products, manually adding sale prices could be an option. However, if you have a lot of products without a sale price, assigning sale prices to each product individually can be a painstaking process that’s prone to mistakes.
With the help of the Bulk Generate Price Bulk Edit function in the Comestri PIM, you can quickly create sale prices for your promotions. You can also use this feature to schedule the start and end date for your sale pricing so that sale prices are sent to the external sales platform on the correct date.
Once you’ve created your Bulk Generate Price Bulk Edit, you must then go to the Bulk Edits page, find your Bulk Generate Price, and select ‘Execute Bulk Edit’ for the prices to be generated.
After generating your sale prices, you should always check that you have set the correct start date and time against these prices.
In this way, Comestri’s Bulk Generate Price function can help you feel confident that your sales campaign will run according to plan.
Optimise your inventory
The success of your sales event also depends on careful management of your stock inventory. You can use stock buffers in Comestri Channels to avoid product oversells on your external sales platforms. This means you should check if stock buffers need to be added to inventory mapping in your Comestri Channels.
Advertise and market your products
Promoting your products during the holiday season helps expand your marketing reach and increase sales. Advertising platforms like Facebook and Google Shopping constantly offer innovative ways for retailers to find more customers and attract more sales dollars. Comestri’s Facebook Channel and Google Shopping Channel allow you to easily send your products to these platforms, helping you grow your reach and sell more. (For more details, see Comestri Facebook Channel and Google Shopping Channel.)
To get the most out of these advertising platforms, you should confirm that the product information (e.g., product titles, prices, images, and description) you are sending to the platforms is consistent with the product information on your e-commerce site.
You should also check that the field mappings in your Comestri Facebook and/or Google Shopping Channels are consistent with the corresponding mappings in the Comestri Channel that sends products to your e-commerce site. Additionally, you need to confirm that the Price Books on all these Comestri Channels are the same.
We hope our advice will help make your holiday sales season a brilliant success!
How can I get more information?
For more details, please contact your Customer Success Manager or the Comestri Support team at support@comestri.com.