2019 Holiday Shopping Predictions

The holiday season is almost here. Retailers have only a few weeks left to finish their to-do lists to prep their stores, online sites, and marketing campaigns. Deloitte predicts overall holiday retail sales to increase between 4.5% and 5% this year, passing $1.1 trillion in sales from November to January. They expect eCommerce sales alone to increase 14% to 18%.

See more holiday shopping predictions for this holiday season below.  

How to Run Smooth Online Flash Sales

Online flash sales are a popular strategy to drive revenue. Successful sales can increase a merchant’s sales from 50/day to over 10,000 in a single 24-hour period. This is great for your revenue, but can undoubtedly put major stress on your operations during and after the sale.

When not handled properly, flash sales can quickly turn into disasters for merchants. Your website can crash or stall. Orders can take forever to process. Inventory can oversell. Once disaster hits, it’s hard to see why you wanted to run a flash sale in the first place. When poorly executed, sales can lead to upset customers, lost sales, and erode your brand image.

While the risks of failed online flash sales are real, they can be avoided!

See how theBalm Cosmetics upgraded their technology stack and worked out important backend processes so they can run smooth flash sales multiple times a year.  

Omnichannel vs Harmonic Retail

Whether you call it multichannel, omnichannel, unified commerce, or converged commerce, retail experts have been trying to coin the approach merchants should take to best serve the fluid customer journey between physical and online stores. Over the past decade or more, omnichannel has been the buzzword slapped on virtually all advice, case studies, reports, and more.

However, with the rise of online shopping, especially mobile and social, the omnichannel strategy has proven to worn out its welcome. Consumers don’t shop by “channel” so retailers shouldn’t approach it that way.

Instead, retail experts are calling for a new approach, harmonic retail, that better describes how to create remarkable experiences for consumers as they interact with your brand across digital and physical touchpoints. In the end, it’s all about understanding your customers and providing the best shopping experience possible.  

Learning from B2C: Making B2B eCommerce More Accessible for Self-Service

(This is a guest post from our friends over at Zoey Commerce,a powerful eCommerce solution for B2B and wholesale businesses.)

Traditionally, B2B eCommerce has been a more manual process than its B2C counterparts. There’s a variety of reasons for this, from more complex product offerings to lagging technology solutions for B2B business. Fortunately, the latter issue has been quickly getting resolved, with off-the-shelf B2B eCommerce solutions providing much more robust capabilities than they did even just a couple of years ago.

For B2B and wholesale sellers, this means the opportunity to take much more time-intensive sales and streamline them, simply by offering their buyers stronger self-service tools. Some of these ideas come from the B2C eCommerce space, and will look familiar to all of us as B2C shoppers when we take off our work hats.

Here’s some ways that B2B businesses can leverage modern eCommerce technology to put more power in the hands of their buyers.

RPV: The Most Important KPI for Your eCommerce Store

(This is a guest post from our friends over at, 121eCommerce, a seasoned Magento Professional Partner and web development agency specializing in B2B and B2C eCommerce.)

If you run an online store, chances are you have your eyes on a lot of KPIs. From return rates to bounce rates, cart abandonment, conversion rates, AOV and more – there’s a lot to keep track of.

So what’s the most important KPI to keep your eye on? 

It’s none of the above.

It’s RPV. Revenue Per Visitor.