On Friday, November 27, 2020, one of the most important e-commerce events will be launched: Black Friday followed by Cyber Monday.
What is Black Friday?
It is a gigantic commercial operation, which appeared in the 1950s in the United States and takes place on the Friday before Thanksgiving. This operation is a day at “broken prices” a month before Christmas. It has become a must-see event, especially since many Internet users have already started their Christmas shopping.
Which stores and products?
Today, almost all brands and brands offer promotions during Black Friday. So we find the giants of the web like Amazon, Cdiscount or FNAC Darty. During this operation, consumers will find mainly high-tech products, furniture and large appliances are in high demand during this commercial period.
To make the most of it, here‘s a quick guide to get the best you can on Black Friday. Learn how to manage your strategy and why Retail Shake is becoming your best ally!
Why is the competition tougher on Black Friday?
Black Friday takes place just before christmas, so there is strong consumer demand. Their goal is to find the products at the best price.
Between private sales, flash sales, promotional offers or sales periods, prices are very competitive and vary from one brand to another for the same product.
1/ Do you have a good competitive watch?
It is all the more important to carry out a competitive watch before this period of strong promotions. Retail Shake is a 360-degree standby tool that lets you track the brands and brands you’re interested in. This allows you to compare your products with those of your competitors. You follow prices, customer reviews, merchandising, geolocation of your products and the stocks of your brand or those of your competitors. This will let you know what products will be sold by them and their promotional policies.
2/ Anticipate the importance of the event.
To anticipate Black Friday, you need to prepare your e-commerce site for the increase in traffic that this will generate.
Browse the website on mobile devices (tablets, smartphones) and on a desktop computer.
Facilitate the user experience (responsive, dedicated Black Friday page…)
Anticipate the number of visits to prevent the risk of breakdowns.
Check your site’s performance and site speed. Too long a loading time will lead visitors directly to leave without having bought anything.
3/ Optimize your fare watch.
During Black Friday, prices are very competitive and vary from one e-commerce site to another for the same product. It is therefore necessary to be vigilant about its price watch in order to be seen as the best in the eyes of the consumer.
Retail Shake offers smart pricing watch. Indeed, our tool is able to collect daily the product pages of your customers and your current and future competitors. Finally, our artificial intelligence matches these products.
With our solution, you are automatically informed and alerted on a daily basis about the competing brands, the number of common references with them, as well as their price indices.
The product sheets of a Seynave suspension in the Retail Shake tool.
If you’d like to learn more about your rate watch, check out our article on this.
4/ Prepare your stocks
During this important commercial operation such as Black Friday, it is necessary to provide a sufficient quantity of products in stock in order to meet the strong consumer demand. So you need to plan your inventory and check your inventory level in order to have a sufficient quantity of products.
To better track your stored products, Retail Shake geolocates your inventory. So you can see on the map, those that are present in each store. In addition, you are alerted on a daily basis about the value and quantity of your stocks. But also on break-ups and overstocks.
Screenshot of our Eglo Townshend suspension tool. You can see the amount of inventory of this product in each store.
Consumers are very sensitive to customer reviews of products: almost 9 out of 10 consumers consult product reviews before purchasing it. With Retail Shake, you can monitor reviews of your products and compare them to those of your competitors.
6/ Improve your merchandising
The points of sale are strategic in the customer journey. We offer you a new way to monitor the good and bad practices of your employees, like those of your competitors.
Retail Shake allows you to share your best merchandising practices with your community (other store, central, supplier…).
The main photo of your product is one of the most important elements of your e-commerce site. Photos that highlight your product are part of the information that most encourages the consumer to buy, in front of customer reviews and product description.
Don’t forget that your visitors to your site can’t touch or see your products. Their only way to have a vision of your product passes with the visuals of your listings. It is therefore essential to have the best main photo. Retail Shake allows you to view photos of your products as well as those of your competitors.
After Black Friday, Cyber Monday arrives
Cyber Monday is a commercial operation that follows Black Friday. This year it will take place on Monday, November 30. Cyber Monday is therefore the online equivalent of Black Friday with even more promotions than Fridays.
Get ready for these two gigantic commercial transactions with Retail Shake!
It becomes essential to know everything, faster, better and before others!
Retail Shake gives superpowers to retail professionals!
It is a subscription application (SaaS) dedicated to the pros of the mass distribution (generalist or specialized), marketplaces as well as brands, whatever their field of activity! It allows teams to track their positioning and marketing-mix (4P) on the market and to be alerted in real time: prices, promos, stocks and photos…
We have just finalized our first fundraiser, and now have the means of our ambitions! For the past 18 months, the founder, Irwan, has built the technical architecture with his small arms and trained 3 junior developers to launch the team. We are now looking for a talented and ambitious tech lead to join the adventure and help us accelerate.
Our stack tech:
Web Front and back-end: PHP, Javascript, MySQL (Bootstrap, jQuery, Smarty, Leaflet), Apache SolR, Spark
Mobile: React Native (Expo)
Scraping: Scrapy, Selenium, Python
Image recognition and machine learning: Tensorflow, OpenCV
Servers: DigitalOcean, Amazon AWS, OVH.
Environment: GitHub, Visual Studio Code, Slack
Monitoring and QA: Uptime Robot, Selenium
You will be responsible for…
Build: animate the roadmap, strategist of the architecture and general design of the platform, listen to needs, build and write the code of evolutions
Deploy: Animate the continuous integration of apps and data (GitHub actions and scripts)
Run: operate a reliable, stable, available, secure platform
Management: being the undisputed reference for the developer team and growing them
Depending on your skills, your ambitions and your professional project, you may eventually become a CTO associate.
Your skills and abilities
Entrepreneurial spirit: motivated, ambitious, visionary and also pugnacious
Tech enthusiast: being both strategist and pragmatic while being on standby
Sense of customer contact: listening to needs, participating in pre-sales
Autonomy / RIgueur: deliver quality, on time, on budget
Taste of management: being a leader, dedicated and loving to grow your team
An experience in retail would be a real plus
Conditions
Compensation: 35-50K depending on your profile – possibility of bonuses and BSPCE (participation in capital)
Location: Euratechnologies (Lille) – telework
Duration: CDI.
The recruitment process
In 3 steps:
Meet the Founder, Irwan
Meet the tech team: Christophe, Clémence and Philippe
A day of testing at the office (Euratechnologies Lille) with technical test
Linear lighting products. We see a tidy stock, no break, a self-service stock and a very readable face.
Inventory management: definition and issues
The acquisition and storage of inventory represents a significant cost to businesses. This is why it is essential to ensure the sustainability of the company, to have good inventory management. To do this, the company must determine:
when to stock up
quantities to buy
This management is essential to meet all customer requests.
Avoid under-storage
If the stock is not large enough, we are talking about stock outages or undersupery. If the company has a product not available at a sale, a stock outage has a negative impact on the service rate. This can result in a loss of the company's customers and buyers, who turn to competition.
This product is out of stock in Caen whereas usually there are at least ten pieces per store.
Avoid overstocking
Maintaining too high a level of products entails very high costs (Logistics, fixed assets …) that weigh heavily in operating accounts. In addition, poorly controlled volumes create a risk of becoming obsolete or aging poorly.
The map shows a store that has ten times more inventory than the neighbouring stores. A surstock that will take up space at the expense of other products in the store. It is also the risk of causing disruptions in the chain's other stores.
How do you manage your inventory?
Safety and alert threshold.
Safety threshold (SS): it aims to avoid stock outage. It is a minimum amount to hold to meet demand. When the safety threshold is reached, the command point is triggered if no Alert Threshold (SA) is set. To be effective, the security threshold must take into account resupply times. The longer the delay, the higher the security stock and vice versa.
Warning threshold (SA): it is the stock that triggers the order, it is equal to minimum stock – security stock. Minimum stock (SM): it is the stock that corresponds to sales during delivery times. For example, a supplier asks for a week of delivery. If the sales of an item are 20 pieces per week, that is the minimum stock. If the store orders with only 15 pieces left, it will be out of stock before the end of the week.
The distribution of your stocks …
To better track your stored products, Retail Shake geolocates your inventory. You can see on the map, those that are present in each store. To get better visibility, you can filter according to your needs (product breaking or less than such number of parts).
Screenshot of our Eglo Townshend suspension tool. You can see the amount of inventory of this product in each store.
You are alerted in real time to the quantity and value of your inventory as well as the stores that are out of order. This information is indicated for each product.
Screenshot of our tools to know the stocks and stock values of each of your products.
Retail Shake helps you locate your inventory, detect any breaks or those that are left. You are then master in your decisions: delivery arbitrages, stock balances in a geographical area, destocking or reverse logistics.
You do not always know where and how your products are requested … The success of market-places has multiplied distribution channels and Retail Shake is here to help! In addition, we offer you to discover a new option to better manage your marketing.
New feature
Are your brand's products marketed in several stores?
Our team has introduced a new feature: it is a "radar" that detects your products in real time within the different brands. Similarly, we tell you they are distributed and how they are presented.
Finally, discover in pictures, below, how to access it!
Do you want to optimize your ranges, make the right decisions quickly and have a real-time photo of your competitive space?
Retail Shake went to discover the Euroshop show which was held from February 16 to 20 in Dusseldorf!
We had the chance to participate in this great three-year mass that is Euroshop in Dusseldorf. It's "THE" global retail show. And it was a learning expedition organized by Business France with our colleagues from Deewee, Alkemics, Alcmeon, Acteos and Belive.
1/ Retail: Focus on customer experience
More than ever, the store cleaners understood that the stores were no longer just points of sale but also places where you could meet, eat, find products, answers, services but also fun and astonishment.
The Edeka Zurheide brand offers corners that strongly express the identity of a brand: Haribo, Kinder, Ferrero. And… oh surprise… in its basement, the gourmet restaurant Setzkasten, number one in Dusseldorf!
2/ Image recognition is ready for the store
… to pay…
This Sunmi fund offers a face recognition paymentPay in cash, QR code or 'Face pay'
… to count customers and track in-store traffic…
… to monitor linear lines, stocks and ruptures.
Captana by SES Imagotag
3/ Terminals are no longer gadgets
How many times have we seen 'test' kiosks in store, broken down or disconnected? The use cases are now clear on the offer extension and on sensitive products.
Here, buy in case of cigarettes… condoms, razor blades and medicines.
4/ Linear information becomes queen
Seeing all these increasingly sophisticated electronic labels made me think of the world of video games. At the time of the first portable consoles, Nintendo had released a black and white Gameboy in order to favor autonomy and portability. Now the Switch displays millions of colors in HD. It is therefore conceivable that these three-colour labels will follow an equivalent progression.
Electronic labels become real product cards.The range of possibilities is becoming immense, at Pricer…… or SES ImagotagThe display even fits the sign's charter. Here, a very glamorous expression.
