That’s a wrap on 2020. As we forage through Q1 of 2021, we are excited to see how the success of Black Friday and Cyber Monday feeds into the new year. Will the momentum continue?
In order to plan for the future we have to learn from the past, which is why we’re happy to provide you with yet another detailed look into eCommerce performance across Q4 2020.
As marketers and business owners, data should be a key driver in making informed business and digital strategy decisions. But, the amount of data out there can often be overwhelming and hard to access.
With our unique position in the eCommerce ecosystem, Klickly is able to generate a huge amount of proprietary data. Because of this, we have a much more nuanced view into digital performance than most other platforms.
By curating this data we can help merchants, marketers, and beyond make well-informed, data-backed decisions setting them up for success as we continue to navigate 2020.
Our Q4 2020 data report consists of over 600 million data points from over 1200 eCommerce merchants across 11 verticals. We anonymously aggregated these data points and examined the week-to-week shift in D2C performance, order details, and on-site behavior.
An overview of eCommerce as a whole
Performance:
As always we first took a look at overall performance. We analyzed GMV, number of orders, number of products, number of new customers, and the average order value on a week-to-week basis.
In early 2020, we saw an initial uptick in sales that was partially due to the distribution of stimulus checks and a dramatic shift to online shopping due to COVID-19. Q3 was all about stabilization from the previous quarters. Orders were mainly driven by returning customers purchasing higher price carts.
There were questions around how Black Friday and Cyber Monday would fare given the pandemic. Many predicted that sale periods would last longer, therefore the typical spike would be slightly less dramatic. While we weren’t closely monitoring overall eCommerce performance the year prior, BFCM 2020 did appear to follow the same large spikes you would expect to see.
Two weeks prior to Black Friday, we saw sales begin to climb (30% from the previous week). The week of Black Friday was the largest week per usual with Cyber Monday seeing a 13% decrease from Black Friday.
Despite the uncertainties and shift to eCommerce, Black Friday was still the preferred week for consumers to shop. This could possibly be due to customers wanting to shop earlier due to availability and stock concerns or simply because Black Friday has more familiarity. Consumers have been conditioned to wait until Black Friday to purchase as they expect the best deals on that day.
Order behaviors:
Secondly, we wanted to get a sense of when, where, and how consumers were shopping. Given Black Friday and Cyber Monday’s influence we saw the top purchasing days were on — you guessed it — Monday and Friday. It’s interesting to note that while Black Friday generated more revenue, Monday generated a higher number of orders. This could mean that there were higher discounts associated with Cyber Monday.
Shopping times remained unchanged from previous quarters with the strongest inclination to shop around lunchtime hours.
There are typically a few categories with outlier states claiming the top 5 geo locations; however, in Q4 the top 5 states were fairly consistent throughout. Large populous states were responsible for the highest order volumes. However, it is interesting to see overall the percentage of sales coming from California was more than double that of the next closest state, Texas.
On-Site behaviors:
Finally we explored the basic on-site consumer behaviors: traffic, click rates, and conversion rates. Overall, traffic continued its steady increase from Q3, with a month over month climb. However, click rate remained flat throughout the quarter. This could indicate a tendency to either only purchase necessity gifts or a more direct path to purchase.
Conversion rates saw a sharp increase throughout October and into November. Throughout December we saw CVR slowly decline as folks wrapped up their holiday shopping. Interestingly we saw an upswing in conversions the final week of the quarter leading into Q1.
Key takeaways:
There’s a lot that can be taken away from this study and hopefully marketers can pinpoint certain areas that are relevant to their digital strategy. I think there’s four main takeaways overall that we saw when doing this study.
- Customers’ habits are here to stay (for now). Despite predictions that BFCM sales would span a longer period of time, customers were still inclined to do most purchasing on these two days.
- Focus on customer acquisition early and retention throughout. The majority of sales were driven by new customers throughout the BFCM weeks. There is an opportunity to jumpstart customer acquisition earlier in order to increase retention sales over this period.
- Drive higher priced carts. Discounts certainly affect this, but have a strategy to increase product count or drive to higher priced items.
Conclusion:
2020 was (hopefully) a black swan year. 2021 is already shaping up to be an exciting year in its own right with a more positive connotation. As brick-and-mortar will slowly return, it is yet to be seen what that will mean for this strong uptick in eCommerce.
While the above outlines eCommerce as a whole, we invite you to download the full report to view vertical-specific information to help inform your decisions throughout Q1.
We cannot stress enough the importance of making informed decisions when it comes to your business and excited to provide helpful research initiatives that give a deeper look into eCommerce performance, trends, and insights.
Klickly will continue to provide quarterly data reports to help you as marketers, merchants, and beyond, better prepare for the future. We hope you’ll sign up to take advantage of this free data.
About Klickly:
For those who are new to Klickly, we are an invite-only 100% commission-based advertising platform that allows eCommerce merchants to lock in their returns by choosing their own commission. Klickly, then advertises your products across 25 Million+ premium online destinations (like the open web, apps, games, etc) only charging when we help make a sale.
