Singles’ Day Is Coming, We’ve Got Your Tracking Covered

The end of the year is a special time for e-commerce businesses. It’s the season where online shoppers are willing to spend more than during any other time of the year. The whole 2017 year-end quarter is well packed with numerous festive opportunities that merchants can take advantage of to maximise sales.

An upcoming mega online sale that has recently caught our attention is China’s Singles’ day (11 November 2017). So we wanted to share some details with you:

What is Singles’ Day?

Singles’ Day or ‘Double 11’ is the biggest shopping event in the world – more than 18 times the size of Amazon Prime Day and six times the size of Black Friday.

What was first started in 2009 by single, Chinese students as a shopping holiday to celebrate their independence grew into an annual massive shopping phenomenon promoted by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. The online sale made history last year by chalking up $18 billion in retail spend.

Why celebrate Singles’ Day on the 11 November?

11 November is also represented numerically as 11.11 – don’t the ‘1s’ looks like sticks? Hence they are representative of single people!

This day in November thus became a good reason for young single people to get together to celebrate the independence of singlehood. It has also become a major event for single people to treat themselves to online shopping.

Well, to conclude – any reason to go shopping.

This festive season is most likely a huge online shopping frenzy for both sellers and buyers. To help you enjoy the shopping and snap up at least a few good deals, we at Parcel Perform have some tips to share with both merchants and shoppers:

Tips for merchants this Singles’ Day

More than 40,000 merchants participated in 2016’s Singles’ Day. Be sure that you stand out by providing your customers with relevant, personalised content and keeping your brand visible to them. An excellent way we can think of that can help you promote your brand and product while providing a useful function to your customers is having your own branded tracking page at your webshop and following up with customers closely post-purchase, such as providing pro-active delivery status updates via email.

Such delivery tracking features are easily accessible via free subscriptions.

There is a long list of marketing benefits that customisable parcel tracking services can provide. You can include your brand elements such as logo and tagline for maximum brand exposure, as well as standardise the layout across all of your tracking communication to keep that brand experience consistent.

In fact, you should even create more than one tracking page if you have customers from different countries so that you can tailor your marketing messages and language to them. Such customised communication also allows you to put up product recommendations so you get to up-sell and cross-sell to your customers, a great opportunity to boost sales.

Now instead of pushing customers out of your reach to carriers’ tracking websites post-purchase, providing your customers with different channels for communicating delivery progress is good to last mile delivery management and contributes towards a pleasant customer experience that will strengthen customers’ loyalty towards your brand.

Besides that, mobile is king in China’s e-commerce market with 71% of 2016 Alibaba’s Singles’ day sale coming from mobile devices. Good news that our tracking pages are fully mobile optimized.

Tips for online shoppers this Singles’ Day

Singles’ Day is like Black Friday or Cyber Monday in the US, just BIGGER. It is not restricted to only singles either, but people and merchants from all over the world will take part. And yes, this means an online shopping war so you might want to leverage the benefits:

Ensure all your questions surrounding products and purchase are answered way before the sale happens and plan your purchases – in other words, do your research on all your favorite brands beforehand so you know what to look out for when the discount comes in;

To minimise the amount of delay during that 24-hour shopping craze, make sure you have enough money in your online shopping account to pay for the goods in your shopping cart, as well as a strong and stable wifi connection for a successful checkout of your shopping cart and payment. Collect as many vouchers and promo codes as you can over the next few days, so you can use them on your purchases – do take note of the terms and conditions for using them though. You need to be quick buying within that 24 hour period, so any delay because of trying to utilise your discounts, topping up or loss of internet connection may cause you to lose that deal because someone may have already snapped it up while you are still fumbling.

Get enough sleep – it’s fastest fingers (and brains) first on Singles’ day sale, so you need to be on top alert to grab the best deals;

Last but not least, avoid a headache when it comes to waiting for your goods to be delivered. Most carriers’ tracking websites are not well-optimised, hence user experience is poor. Plus, you will not want to check all the different shipments on different websites non-stop, right? You’ve got better stuff to do. And we know that. That’s why we propose you use our Parcel Monitor tracking website instead.

Any shopper can search and monitor their parcels on Parcel Monitor anytime and anywhere as our tracking pages are optimized on desktop as well as mobile devices, and across all browsers. Our platform is fully integrated with more than 850 carriers. Be it a domestic or a multi-national carrier that is engaged for your delivery, we will have you covered.

Our special recommendation: Make use of our ‘Get Updates’ feature to sign up for email tracking notifications so you get automatically updated whenever there is a change in delivery status. No need to keep coming back to the tracking website to check on progress – simply provide us your email address.

Singles’ Day is a shopping spree not to be missed. Shoppers and merchants, are you prepared yet?

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