Cyber Monday – The Pumpkin Spice Latte Approach

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are once again upon us. I know this to be true as all the usual signs have been ticked off. For example, the clocks went back, the nights are drawing in, the leaves have turned brown, a popular coffee chain started to push the Pumpkin Spiced Latte (PSL), fireworks seem to constantly go off just as I take the dog out, and most importantly they're showing Shaun of The Dead at my local cinema – that’s right, Autumn is in full swing – and in fact Winter is just around the corner and that means shopping time!

The History of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Nothing is more geared towards the shopping craze of this season than Black Friday, swiftly followed by Cyber Monday. For those of you who don’t know the term, Black Friday is an American invention, first used in the press to describe the Gold Market crash of 1869. It was then coined in a retail/shopping sense in the 1950s by the Philadelphia police department to describe the chaos on the day after thanksgiving when tourists and suburbanites all entered the city at once to enjoy discounted shopping the day before the annual Army V Navy Football game. The rates of traffic incidents and shoplifting all increased dramatically and the cops had to work longer to deal with all the issues. Certainly, a black day if you’re a cop. Thanks, History Channel.

Over the years the retailers of Philadelphia took hold of the name and used it to their advantage to drive sales, by the 1990s it was commonly used across The States but it’s only in the last 10 years or so that it has become a phenomenon in the UK, largely thanks to Amazon. Now the UK has the 2nd most Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in the world (1st being the US) at over £6 Billion spent – with around 60% being spent on Cyber Monday, i.e. online.

Poor Planning Could Be Disastrous

If you work in retail or eCommerce then Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge and require a great deal of planning and preparation. Why? Because the opportunity to increase revenues in the short term and build brand reputation and customer base over the long term is massive.

However, we regularly see organisations failing to prepare and having issues that impact their ability to maximise sales. Setting bricks and mortar stores aside, let’s look at eCommerce. According to research by Community Central even at normal times, the top 200 UK online retailers state they lose 10% of sales every year due to poor website performance or websites simply being down. This is billions of pounds and it’s only exacerbated during Cyber Monday as the volumes of traffic to sites and sales as a proportion of yearly takings are up. This means if you have website issues during Cyber Monday it could ruin your year.

Add in the backlash on social media from letting customers down and it really is reputational suicide to not prepare your online offerings for increased traffic.

And of course, the website is only 1 part of the process, once purchases are made, are the back office solutions that deal with stock management, warehousing, billing, logistics, returns etc all properly integrated and robust enough to deal with the volume? Even consider, do you have enough human capacity to physically pick and pack orders – it sounds simple, but issues happen every year.

The PSL Approach

For a lesson on how to avoid such issues, I think the PSL is a good example. Starbucks didn’t put it out and hope it did OK, they planned for it to be successful. They started with a plan or business case, they empowered a team to research and then create a high-quality drink, tested it with consumers, refined it, and then when they knew they had a quality product that they could support, they rolled it out to stores and in turn customers.

Imagine if they had simply made it, and shipped it without testing it, without having the capacity built up to provide more, and without creating training for their staff on how to make it correctly each time.

Sounds like a bad idea doesn’t it but that approach sadly is often present in technology. Build it quickly, get it out there, find issues in live, and fix them as we go. In short, if there isn’t a plan to build quality in from the start, predictably; quality, scalability, performance, usability, etc. are found lacking – in this context, it’s easy to see why the UK’s biggest 200 eCommerce organisations lose billions in potential revenue a year due to tech issues.

Build in Quality from the start

The approach of building quality in from the start, or Quality Engineering, is the PSL approach. Embedding quality into a solution from the start of the process, giving all involved confidence that when volumes increase on Cyber Monday, the website and the back-end systems are up to the challenge. This is what Roq do for our clients in the retail and eCommerce space and one such example of where we have done just that can be seen here.

Next time you get a PSL (if you actually like to drink them that is) think about the quality process that was followed to make it what it is now and the quality of the customer experience. Compare that to a time when you were about to check out on a website and the site crashed or was so slow, you simply gave up. I think you’ll agree the quality approach is the better option.

If you are looking to learn more about building quality into your software solutions to help drive sales then please get in touch or find out more about Roq.

Thanks for reading.

David Moore – Client Services Manager, Roq