Capping the 2019 Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend (BFCM), Stitch Labs Inc., the leading inventory and order management software, is releasing key trends from this past year’s BFCM and announces a successful holiday season for their customers.
This BFCM, SalesForce reported record-breaking numbers of online sales reaching $31 billion in the U.S. alone. Jumping 15% from 2018, consumer trends continue to shift towards online shopping. As online buyers rise, ensuring orders, fulfillment, inventory and shipping processes are fully baked during this sales-heavy weekend is crucial for modern brands.
The average direct-to-consumer brand pulls 40% of its annual revenue during the BFCM weekend. With double the amount of traffic, the sheer volume of web visitors and product orders make site crashes and shipping delays inevitable for many — costing brands thousands of dollars in revenue and customer loyalty.
With millions of data points, Stitch Labs shares some key trends from 2019 BFCM to guide brands to an even more successful holiday peak season in 2020. Below are this year’s findings:
- Many people think of BFCM sales as exclusive to the weekend, but data shows that brands experienced sales increases as early as November 27th this year.
- While sales on products can be specific to individual days, sales orders for brands are not consistent throughout the whole day. DTC brands saw Black Friday sales orders spike at 11pm PT with a relative lull between 1-8pm PT.
- Cyber Monday’s sales orders followed a different trend with high volume between 9-11:30am PT and then a consistent decrease until a small spike between 10pm-12am PT.
- 26 million orders processed annually and $4.5 billion in annual merchant transactional revenue.
Stitch Labs helped thousands of its brands including Vita Cup and Cozy Earth pull off a successful (and lucrative) weekend without a single issue, positioning them to succeed every peak season. “Stitch Labs has spent significant time innovating our sales order processing infrastructure to handle our customers’ ever increasing order volume and operational complexity, allowing them to focus on mastering holiday season marketing strategy, instead of worrying about their business operations,” said Brandon Levey, Chief Executive Officer, Stitch Labs. “Stitch’s reliable technology and extensive partner network allowed top brands to process more than 2,300 orders per hour with a 99.9% system uptime.”
VitaCup, the nutrient-packed coffee company, implemented Stitch Labs to take control during the peak season. With Stitch Labs, COO Ryan Savage explains how they now have the “ability to process orders, understand data, and make changes on the fly.” Stitch Labs provides the flexibility and scalability to run a variety of promotions. Without Stitch Labs, “we would have had to change our entire Black Friday Cyber Monday offering because with the old system doing a special buy-one, get-one-free or a Christmas bundle would have been impossible.” Like most brands, VitaCup is “all-hands-on-deck the entire weekend” and compared to BFCM 2018, this year “it all went off without a hitch.”
For Cozy Earth, the premium eco-friendly bedding company, Stitch Labs eliminated the unknowns and provided complete operational visibility. The game-changing kicker is “knowing exactly how much inventory to order,” describes Head of Operations Nate Christensen. After landing on Oprah’s Best list, Cozy Earth explains that Stitch Labs was not only “critical in helping us double our revenue goal,” but “without Stitch Labs, we wouldn’t have been able to sell bundles or facilitate our Oprah’s Best traffic.” Christensen details that in addition to inventory transparency, “Stitch gives us access to better customer service, making customer’s feel so much more empowered.” After implementing Stitch Labs, Cozy Earth experienced three times the growth from BFCM 2018 to BFCM 2019.
Today’s data release and announcements furthers Stitch Labs’ commitment to ecommerce brands and support in the industry. Brands choose Stitch Labs to manage their operations with a reliable system they can trust, maximize revenues during peak periods, and gain insider expertise to prepare for every sale.
