Black Friday 2019 is running one week later this year. The big day will begin on November 29, the day after Thanksgiving. But, despite this late start, many Black Friday deals will start running in early November (in fact, some great ones are even live now). So here is your definitive guide to Black Friday 2019 sales times for Amazon, Best Buy, Target And Walmart. Be prepared.
Pre-Black Friday Sales Are Starting Now
As mentioned, the first Black Friday sales have already started and Best Buy currently has some of the best AirPods deals you’ll find this year. I still expect the majority of sales to start on 1 November (Amazon is famed for its month-long Black Friday shopping) but Best Buy has already tempted other major retailers to break ranks early. Walmart, for example, will start some solid deals tomorrow (bookmark my page to know when they go live) and I expect the damn will then burst.
Best Buy Black Friday 2019: Here Are The First Deals
Despite all these pre-sales, most in-store sales are unlikely to start until Thanksgiving Day, though online Black Friday sales will begin as early as Monday, November 25. Here are my predictions for when the most popular retailers will start their sales.
Amazon – I expect Amazon to start its ‘Countdown to Black Friday’ sale on November 1. It will probably begin its ‘Black Friday Week’ event on Friday, November 22. Watch out for juicy Apple deals this year but otherwise, I recommend holding off until Thanksgiving Day or Black Friday for the best doorbusters.
Best Buy – If prior years are any indication, Best Buy will start its in-store sale at 5pm on Thanksgiving Day in 2019. Previously it has closed at around 1 am on Black Friday morning before reopening at 8 am. The pressure is now on to stay open all night, but I suspect Best Buy could use a similar format this year to create some separation between its Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales.
Target Black Friday 2019 will run an early access Black Friday sale in mid-November
Mike Mozart
Target – Target’s in-store Black Friday sale will begin on Thanksgiving Day at 6 pm this year. Online deals will be available all day on Thursday and Friday with some deals remaining live over the weekend. Target normally has an early-access event on the day it releases its ad scan, which should be around November 11/12.
Walmart – Sticking to tradition, I understand Walmart will start its in-store Black Friday sale on Thanksgiving Day at 6 pm. Despite pressure to go earlier, Walmart seems to be locked into this timeslot, but it will hold online Black Friday sales throughout Thanksgiving and Black Friday with most deals available across the entire weekend through to Cyber Monday.
I am an experienced freelance technology journalist. I have written for Wired, The Next Web, TrustedReviews, The Guardian and the BBC in addition to Forbes. I began in b2b print journalism covering tech companies at the height of the dot com boom and switched to covering consumer technology as the iPod began to take off. A career highlight for me was being a founding member of TrustedReviews. It started in 2003 and we were repeatedly told websites could not compete with print! Within four years we were purchased by IPC Media (Time Warner’s publishing division) to become its flagship tech title. What fascinates me are the machinations of technology’s biggest companies. Got a pitch, tip or leak? Contact me on my professional Facebook page. I don’t bite.
Why are we talking about the holiday’s in the middle of August? Because putting in the work to create Black Friday ads starts now – at least, if you want to succeed for the 2019 holiday season. Last year, we had incredible wins for our clients, but we started prepping in October. This year, we’re taking it a step further and planning our marketing strategy for Black Friday 2019 in the summer. Your first step in preparing your brand starts with learning from this video, where Taylor Holiday breaks down the three main marketing strategies we are laser-focusing on for the Black Friday shopping season. Stay tuned as we release weekly content about holiday advertising strategy and actionable steps you can take to win on Black Friday. Want more strategies for success beyond our awesome video content? Work with us at Common Thread! Learn more about how to scale your ads for the holiday’s here: https://commonthreadco.com/pages/contact
Meet Beverly. She’s worked at UPS for 10 years. She has one to two kids and is earning $40,000 to $50,000 per year. She has limited or no access to credit and can’t handle an unexpected expense of more than $500. And her fridge just broke.
Chris DiMarco knows Beverly well; she’s a hypothetical representation of the target customer for Perpay, the fintech company he launched in 2014. DiMarco co-founded the Philadelphia-based Perpay, along with David Hayne, with the goal of helping people who struggle with debt better afford unplanned big-ticket purchases.
On Perpay’s Amazon-style shopping site, users can buy items from brands like KitchenAid and LG–basically anything you can find at Best Buy or Walmart, DiMarco says. They pay for purchases over time with deductions from each paycheck.
Instead of charging interest to make money, Perpay operates like other e-commerce marketplaces: It buys items wholesale from distributors and sells them at a markup. The model is paying dividends. With more than one million users to date, Perpay’s revenue has grown 18,166 percent over three years to $22.5 million in 2018–helping it land No. 5 on Inc.‘s annual tally of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S.
A light bulb moment
This isn’t DiMarco’s first time on the Inc. 5000. In 2015, his previous venture, Lamps.com, a Philadelphia-based e-commerce site that primarily sells lamps and other lighting equipment, landed on Inc.‘s list at No. 161. While the 12-person company pulled in north of $3 million in revenue that year, DiMarco got the urge to start another company, so he stepped down as CEO.
His idea for Perpay came from examining Lamps.com’s HR benefits. Various providers promise to reward employees with items like discounted movie tickets, among other goods. Vendors clearly had large enough profit margins to afford discounts, and were choosing which companies could access them. DiMarco wondered if he could make adirect-to-consumer version.
He posed the concept to Hayne, his childhood friend who was the COO of Free People, a women’s apparel brand owned by Urban Outfitters that Hayne’s father founded in 1970. Hayne, Lamps.com’s first investor, was intrigued.
The pair started by identifying common financial stresses in people’s lives to find their ideal customer. Working backward, they stumbled onto the Perpay marketplace concept; both men had worked in the retail world, but neither had any formal experience with the rent-to-own industry, which differs from the layaway model by allowing customers to obtain the goods they want immediately and pay for them over time.
Perpay’s offices in Philadelphia.Hannah Yoon
Still, the more they thought about the idea, the more they liked it: a “white knight” alternative to rent-to-own vendors that cater to vulnerable consumers, often charging them extremely high interest rates and fees. One example: Rent-a-Center, the massive Plano, Texas-based rent-to-own furniture and electronics business, regularly charges customers up to three times a retail item’s list price or tacks on other fees that are roughly equivalent to triple-digit annual percentage rates, according to a 2017 NerdWallet investigation. (Rent-a-Center did not respond to several requests for comment and verification.)
Perpay also charges more than traditional retailers, on average. A Ring Video Doorbell 2 on Perpay currently costs $259.99 plus $12.99 shipping. The same item on Best Buy’s website is $199.99 with free shipping, and comes with a free Amazon Echo Dot.
While Perpay enjoys an A-plus rating on the Better Business Bureau’s website, it has drawn a number of complaints about its pricing. To that, DiMarco says: “We’re very comfortable with our pricing, because it’s so much fairer than the alternative.”
Perpay may also levy fees on users who don’t pay on time. The company’s terms and conditions list a $35 charge each time a customer delays a payment. DiMarco counters that the company has never actually levied that $35 fee, and that the language is “standard legal verbiage” recommended by the company’s lawyers. The clause, he says, exists for legal protection–and he’s considering removing the fee entirely. Even so, he adds: “If you follow our rules, you’ll be fine.”
A place for all
Perpay could make sense for a specific segment of users, says Graciela Aponte-Diaz, a policy director at the Durham, North Carolina-based Center for Responsible Lending. Those who live in states with fewer financial regulations, like California, for instance, might consider it as an alternative to payday loans, which are small, short-term unsecured loans. Payday lenders in the state have been known to charge some of the highest interest rates in the country, adds Aponte-Diaz. By contrast, Perpay may be less attractive for those in high-regulation states like New York, as it faces tougher competition from providers.
DiMarco insists his product has a place in any employed and credit-challenged person’s household, and he says that Perpay more closely competes with rent-to-own vendors than payday lenders. “All situations are different,” he says. “We just work with the customer on what the best approach is.”
Some customers, for example, need to find alternative methods of payment if they get fired or change jobs midway through paying for an item. Perpay employs a full-time staffer dedicated to solving those issues–solutions range from allowing customers to pay installments with debit cards to putting accounts on hold–and recently instituted automated tools to help manage payment reschedulings.
That kind of individual attention may prove challenging as Perpay continues to scale. DiMarco’s short-term goal is to add more marketplace categories—the company recently added tires and baby equipment to its catalog. His long-term goal is to create stronger relationships with wholesale distributors so he can lower Perpay’s prices. He also expressed interest in expanding Perpay’s scope. One idea: a Perpay-backed credit card, with which consumers’ Perpay history could help improve their real-life credit. Currently, using Perpay does not affect users’ credit, for better or worse.
“The ultimate goal would be to improve somebody’s credit to the point where they actually are a prime borrower,” DiMarco says. “Can we do that today? No. Butwe’d like to keep providing more products to our best customers.”
Clarification: An earlier version of this article contained a reference the inclusion of which overemphasized the significance of Perpay’s terms and conditions statement regarding its ability to edit or otherwise alter online reviews. The reference has been removed. While the company can edit or otherwise alter third-party reviews, the company doesn’t, nor does it plan to.
The e-commerce giant bans shoppers from the site for infractions such as returning too many items, sometimes without telling them what they did wrong. Amazon has cultivated an image as a customer-friendly company in part by making it easy for shoppers to send back items they don’t want. The site’s lax return policies have conditioned consumers to expect the same treatment from other retailers, adding to pressure on brick-and-mortar chains. But shoppers are finding out there are some customers Amazon has determined aren’t worth keeping………….
Crooks who hack online merchants to steal payment card data are constantly coming up with crafty ways to hide their malicious code on Web sites. In Internet ages past, this often meant obfuscating it as giant blobs of gibberish text that was obvious even to the untrained eye. These days, a compromised e-commerce site is more likely to be seeded with a tiny snippet of code that invokes a hostile domain which appears harmless or that is virtually indistinguishable from the hacked site’s own domain.Before going further, I should note that this post includes references to domains that are either compromised or actively stealing user data…………
Now that you can almost smell the turkey roasting in the oven, you might be in the mood to shop: NerdWallet’s 2018 Holiday Shopping Report found that the nation’s consumers plan to spend an average of $776 on gifts this year, which is $116 more than they said they planned to spend last year. They’ll also be buying more of those gifts with credit cards — almost three-quarters of shoppers surveyed said they plan to buy presents with a credit card, while just 58% of shoppers said that last year. They estimate it will take them just over three months to pay off those purchases. Meanwhile, more than 1 in 4 people who purchased gifts with credit cards last year are still paying off those balances today………..
This year shoppers will go about their business in a retail environment where online commerce has taken a bigger piece of the holiday sales pie. Customers are clearly appreciating the frictionless shopping experience that online platforms and payment providers can offer. It also doesn’t hurt that 59 percent of people, according to a PayPal study, would rather do almost anything than deal with holiday shopping crowds. That includes shoveling snow for a quarter of that group……..
Sears HoldingsSHLD +39.91% is shuttering 142 additional Sears and Kmart stores this year, it announced Monday as it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company plans to start liquidation sales soon at those locations. Experts, though, say savvy shoppers may have already claimed many of the best bargains at least when it comes to the struggling retailer’s real estate portfolio. So what’s left may be sitting on the shelf for a while……
This is where the fun starts. Fetching products without the need for an API. No more time consuming processes of waiting for product advertising API approvals before you can get your affiliate stores live and start selling with the Automation Hub built into Affiliate Hub Builder, including the groundbreaking Ten Second Setup technology, you’re up and running right faster than you can imagine. It’s no Longer news that the more products you can list on your store the greater your chances of bigger and better commissions. Gone are the days where you can only join overrated affiliate networks that only allow you to fetch products with their API. What happens to your local eCommerce stores that are not part of the big affiliate networks but provides deeplinks……
B2B online stores? B2B online shopping?Aren’t those oxymorons?If headlines and trending stories count for anything: yes.Most people think of B2B as a Stone Age industry. It conjures up images of old-school sales teams, drawn-out deal cycles, print-order catalogs, and fax machines.
However, for those willing to look beyond the headlines, nothing could be further from the truth. B2B ecommerce is now more than double B2C and growing.Savvy B2B companies are already taking advantage online shopping to help customers buy faster and easier.
They’re using features like wholesale portals, online account creation, content marketing, and even dynamic pricing to automate large portions of the sales process.Most importantly, they are adapting to the B2C-like experience B2B buyers now expect. Here’s how companies are succeeding with B2B online stores, and how you can too …
One-on-one guidance for B2B ecommerce growth
Shopify Plus hosts ecommerce’s largest ecosystem of Merchant Success Managers, ecommerce Gurus, and award-winning Agency Partners.
Those are just a few of the reasons — along with a dedicated wholesale channel for B2B sales — our merchants are growing 126% year over year.
Good News and Bad News for B2B Online Stores
As a starting point, according to data from Statista, worldwide B2B ecommerce sales are over three times larger than B2C:
Part of this growing trend lies in the size B2B buyers:
B2C average order value: $147
B2B average order value: $491
But size isn’t everything. Where typical B2C conversion rates hover in the low single digits, B2B online stores average around 10%. In addition, Forrester found:
B2B buyers not only report higher total spend online, but also higher percentages of work purchases made online.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that most B2B online stores still struggle to capture the demands of a shifting consumer market, what is commonly referred to as the “era of empowered customers.”
If you’re trying to sell to B2B customers, taking advantage of these trends on a platform that facilitates multi-channel software them is a must.
Integrate B2C Trends into B2B Online Shopping
Read almost any B2B ecommerce article and you’ll see a familiar pattern…
Your B2B online store should resemble a B2C one. The simple reason is that buyers prefer the B2C-style store over a typical B2B experience.
Business customers rank run-of-the-mill B2C features as integral to their shopping experience. In fact, customers are more likely to switch companies if you have a difficult checkout experience with poor purchasing options.
Staying in the dark ages isn’t an option. Not when the market is trending past $7 trillion. Not when consumers are demanding better B2B online store experiences.
Beard & Blade is a prime example of breaking the traditional B2B sales stereotypes. On their site, you can apply for and gain instant access to a wholesale account, giving buyers access to their own online sales portal:
Once inside, their B2B online store is mobile optimized and includes custom pricing lists built for specific customer segments:
Even better, Beard & Blade’s wholesale store operates on the same backend as their B2C store. Inventory for wholesale orders is automatically pulled from a single inventory pool and is synchronized with orders and customers in one admin for real-time monitoring and analysis.
At the same time, the turnkey, password-protected wholesale portal allows Beard & Blade to control which high-volume customers have access to:
Select products or collections
Fixed, percentage off, or volume-based discounts
Minimum and maximum quantity increments
As Ben Chidiac, the co-founder of Beard & Blade, explains:
“As in retail, business customers benefit greatly from the time and effort savings of online ordering, in their own time, with full visibility of the status of their order.
Servicing both a B2B and D2C (direct to consumer) audience, Nicotine River uses a storefront that looks, feels, and acts like a typical B2C experience. Their product pages call attention to free shipping thresholds, contact information, a prominent Add to Cart button — as opposed to out-dated phone, fax, or email CTAs — and social proof in the form of ratings and reviews.
On their site, you’ll find both DIY and wholesale buying paths. For each, customer logins allow buyers to manage order history and track shipments. They also include multiple payment methods to speed up the traditional cart-based checkout process.
Lastly, Nicotine River uses popup overlays to entice subscribers with deals and rewards:
In other words, gone are the days of calling in or submitting a written form, only to wait, and wait, and wait for someone to get respond.
But what about “enhanced search functionality,” which B2B buyers rank as their most essential online feature?
To meet this demand, V-Belt Guys uses Shopify app LiveSearch to give buyers instant results — as well as visual merchandising — to nearly any search query: product type, materials, specifications, or ordering codes.
Each of these B2B online stores has one simple thing in common: they make B2B online shopping as easy as possible.
They’re willingly turning over purchasing power to buyers because they don’t want buyers to dread the process. They’re ditching the old-school, opaque sales process in the pursuit of a better customer experience.
Create a Content Funnel to Drive B2B Online Sales
Very few new B2B buyers simply land on your site and become a new customer.
More than likely, they’ll browse from channel to channel before reaching out the first time. Salesforce pegs that number at around 6-8 touches prior to becoming a lead.
But there are a few ways to move buyers down your funnel faster than normal. One of the best ways to do that is by creating content that buyers are already looking for:
This is what they’re doing during all those preemptive touches. They’re reading, digging, and — most importantly — researching.
B2B buyers prefer to self-educate well over halfway through a purchase decision rather than connect with a company sales rep.
This principle drives smart-glass manufacturer View, whose educational content leads with customer-focused benefits:
What’s more, they take the technical and make it simple:
Polycom uses a content-based strategy to funnel customers from different pain points to their products. And they build this process into the very first option on their navigation bar.
Notice how the subheadings under “I need to” relate to many of the best practices we’ve already examined:
Understand — to educate buyers
Select — to guide purchase decisions
Implement — for post-transaction support
If a new customer arrives at their site, they can learn more about their own problem and potential solutions. Instead of pitching products, your goal is to develop need awareness so the buyer places a real value on solving their problem.
Of course, in many cases, stories are far more powerful than feature lists and product specifications. That’s why a great deal of the B2B marketing we do here at Shopify Plus is customer-centric rather than product-centric.
Instead of making the product the hero, our aim in storytelling is to make the business the hero:
This sounds great in theory, but in practice, knowing what kind of content to create and where to put it can feel overwhelming.
Thankfully, two sources provide guidance.
First, LinkedIn’s Rethinking the B2B Buyer’s Journey contains a detailed breakdown of the types of content that connect with buyers at each stage of the funnel:
Second, our own Merchant Acceleration team recently put together a Data Analysis course exclusively for Shopify Plus merchants, but you can access their customer persona process and customer journey map templates by reading either of those linked articles or by clicking the below image:
When done correctly this approach helps customers educate themselves without ever speaking to a member of your sales team.
Build Loyal Customers Faster with Transparency
Transparent pricing and product details are the number one factor in producing repeat B2B orders:
Surprisingly, “transparency” was a full three spots ahead of lower pricing. Of course, full transparency extends past the shelf price to include everything from shipping fees to taxes to warranties.
Transparency, though, can come in many forms. It can mean a satisfaction guarantee if someone’s not happy with their experience. It can even apply to social proof in the forms of customer reviews.
Merchology does all this on their B2B online store by including both customer reviews as well as real-time product pricing based on order quantity using Shopify Scripts:
Shipping offers and order quantity make sure that buyers know what they’re getting every single time. Dynamic pricing helps cut through the clutter.
Buyers don’t need to call a sales rep and worry about price gouging when they can see order values update in real-time. And reviews help to give clarity to hesitant buyers when it comes to testing new products.
Focus on Producing Recurring Orders to Increase Sales
Even in B2B, most first-time customers are unprofitable when you factor in cost of acquisition and fulfillment. It might take up to a full year to break even. That’s why recurring orders are the lifeblood of B2B sales: the longer you hang onto a customer, the more profitable they become.
Marketing Metrics shows that repeat customers have a 60-70% chance of converting (compared to the single or barely double-digit conversion rate for new customers).
One way that B2B online stores can keep repeat customers coming back is through customized logins, histories, recommendations, and prices.
For example, Grainger uses customized logins to structure pricing based on each client, rather than blanket pricing:
In some cases, recurring orders through month-to-month subscriptions add powerful streamlined incentives. Cleaning, medical, and office supplies — as well as consumer packaged goods bought in bulk — all fall under a short shelf. As a result, tools like Recurring Orders and ReCharge are ideal fits.
In other cases, product and buying cycles vary considerably.
Schools, for instance, buy bulk books for several classes across a single grade. They’re not going to purchase several years worth. Instead, they’ll purchase 50 or 100 on BookPal in the summer. Then, they’ll come back next year to do the exact same order.
Whatever the average re-order cycle for your products, B2B online stores can and should guide existing customers so that procurement departments can simply refer back to previous orders, quantities, and pricing to speed up the second, third, and fourth purchase.
Re-purchases drive the lifetime value of each B2B customer higher so that companies are able to recoup their initial investment in advertising, marketing, sales, and support.
One-on-one guidance for B2B ecommerce growth
Shopify Plus hosts ecommerce’s largest ecosystem of Merchant Success Managers, ecommerce Gurus, and award-winning Agency Partners.
Those are just a few of the reasons — along with a dedicated wholesale channel for B2B sales — our merchants are growing 126% year over year.
Reimagining B2B Online Stores
B2C online stores might get more attention. But they pale in comparison to the total transaction volume in B2B.
The best B2B online stores dominate their respective markets by …
Borrowing B2C best practices
Creating funnel-based content
Injecting full transparency
Making re-orders easy and natural
B2B ecommerce has already moved beyond B2B’s traditional roots.Have you?
