Thursday, November 20, 2014

Thoughts On Christmas Season Sales? When Early Is To Early


This article is directly linked to the one I wrote about Alibaba's single day records. Indeed, in the US, Christmas season has started a while ago. 

One of the best techniques to beat your competitors during the season sales is to sell your goods before them. This is the reason why big retailers tend to start the season earlier, with large discounts in order to stock customers which will then avoid to buy other goods at the competition. But as sales are getting tough in this economy, the race to be the first one to open the season has brought them to be out of reason: People are questionning why they should buy Christmas decorations while they have not even finished celebrating halloween and that Thanksgiving is a month after... 

Indeed, even though being the first is great, the time to market is also key to maximize sales. And by being too much in advance, you may not trigger the sales you expect. I believe that the approach of Alibaba to create a new event of singles day could actually be a better technique to generate sales and traffic.

What do you think about it?