How can you improve sales for the 2024 holiday selling season? Consider adopting one of the newest tools in e-commerce to sell more this year online. Whether providing better payment options or pushing products into more places, the tools are now out there to help make 2024 your best sales season.
We’ve pulled some of our most powerful selling trends for the 2024 holiday season to give you some ideas. A central fulfillment center that manages your stock and communicates inventory is central to nearly every new sales tool. Contact us with questions. We’ll be happy to discuss the value PFK provides.
Personalized Retail Experiences
2024 is the year that retailers will use AI and other services to offer a more personalized shopping experience for their customers. This includes tailored product recommendations, dynamic pricing, and customized marketing messages based on customer behavior and preferences.
In WooCommerce, for instance, a whole suite of new plugins use AI to analyze a customer’s on-site activity and offer upsells, cross-sells, discounts, and related products. Such products always existed, but AI makes them work much better.
Plugins that analyze your customer’s menu keyword searches change the display to focus on those products over other products. Personalization is one of this year’s most potent selling trends leveraged when the customer is most apt to buy.
Omnichannel Integration
The seamless integration of online and offline shopping experiences continues to be a priority. Click-and-collect services, real-time inventory updates, and virtual try-on technologies enhance shoppers’ convenience.
Omnichannel strategies, like using one system for in-person and online sales, make online sales much more profitable… If you have a centralized inventory system.
Like Precision Fulfillment and Kitting, fulfillment houses are especially suited for an omnichannel strategy. With a fulfillment house at the center of your retail data strategy, the inventory is separated from the website. Instead, selling services pull from a single service (PFK’s inventory software) to get accurate inventory levels across all channels.
An omnichannel model allows companies to sell on their website, via social sites, in person with a POS system, over the phone, or in-store—with every channel accessing the most current inventory numbers. This one of our selling trends dramatically reduces customer complaints about selling items where they don’t have a product.
Returns management is also more accessible using a fulfillment-centered strategy. Regardless of what online channels handle the sale, every order return is managed by the same service—your fulfillment house. This greatly simplifies returns, so you don’t have a different return strategy for each selling channel.
The Rise of Social Commerce in Selling Trends
Social media platforms are becoming crucial sales channels in this year’s selling trends. Features like shoppable posts, live-streamed shopping events, and influencer partnerships drive sales and engagement.
During last year’s holiday season (2023), nearly 19% of all online sales were made on social media. Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Shopping, selling on X, posting using unique sales URLs, and several other online channels make social channels a massive trend for 2024. Popularity is only expected to grow.
Like the omnichannel strategy, social commerce relies on a centralized fulfillment system with an accurate inventory count. PFK’s centralized inventory services do that and more.
Shopify is also an excellent service that leverages and maximizes social marketplaces. Multi-channel sales are native to Shopify’s app, so you can sell on your Shopify website and several social selling sites, all while keeping your inventory synced with PFK. Making the connection doesn’t require any additional software or expertise. Creating a connection to a social marketplace store is a simple authentication process from Shopify. That means you don’t have to hire an IT specialist. You can do your own IT!
Flexible Payment Options
Adopting flexible payment methods, such as buy now or pay later (BNPL), is growing. Shoppers appreciate the ability to spread out payments, particularly for higher-ticket items.
Providing more ways to pay gives potential customers more reasons to finish their shopping carts.
For instance, when you buy tickets on Ticketmaster now, they allow installments, instant payment, guest payments, and even payment financing. Maybe that tells you how expensive concert tickets are nowadays, but at least they provide options.
REI went one step further by offering instant discounts for membership into their REI membership program.
Many other small businesses have leveraged third-party payment services with their payment options. A very popular payment service in 2024 is Klarna. Small retailers add the Klarna payment options to their checkout cart so customers can make four easy payments instead of one large payment while the retailer gets paid now. PayPal, Shopify Pay, and all the other payment processors have similar programs.
Payment options like Klarna aim to move customers through the shopping cart to a sale. The metric is called the “Cart Completion” rate. Getting a higher cart completion is a huge problem for online retailers because it’s both a missed opportunity and the lowest-hanging fruit. Providing flexible payment options is a very serious way to solve that problem.
Consider PFK for eCommerce Fulfillment
Centralized inventory is the binding solution for nearly every new tool to improve sales online in 2024. PFK is a leader in centralized fulfillment and can ensure that every channel you adopt will correctly pull from the same inventory and reflect current inventory numbers.
Interested in finding out more about PFK? Contact us online anytime, and let’s show you how using a private fulfillment house can improve your online sales in 2024.