Seizing the Opportunities of International Events

Improve Your eCommerce with Special Events and Holidays

International eCommerce comes with certain major advantages for managing cash flows. One such advantage stems from the fact that different locations have various holidays and seasons, where specific promotions can be run around these events. It’s advisable to load up a calendar with established traditions and national holidays, so that your international eCommerce application can provide timely promotions and increase sales volume in anticipation of those special events.

A fundamental functionality must be available within your international eCommerce, to fully take advantage of the aforementioned special events and scenarios. The platform must allow you to:

• Split out different sales to across regions
• Apply automatic discounts or specific coupon codes that may be limited per user
• Run promotions in a region or country
• Perform a combination of the above
• Enable advanced workflow adjustments based on the actual holiday

For example, you might have a scenario where the shipping is much slower during a holiday period in just one region. Well, does your international eCommerce platform have these capabilities to divide the sales? Only then you will be able to efficiently handle the situation and reap the benefits.

This does not only involve applying a sale to an item within your international eCommerce but applying it to a specific region instead. Perhaps you wish to run the sale on a set of items within an area or a category within a region. As an example, if you are targeting a German holiday, maybe you would choose to create a category called Bratwurst Fest and have related products under it. You could also offer Mardi Gras offerings to states that celebrate this event or target certain religious groups in different regions with their respective holiday celebrations and related items. You may exhibit a large degree of creativity when it comes to the possibilities of such a capability.

Whenever there is a national holiday or event with loyal followers who proudly celebrate it nationally, it presents a unique opportunity. You'll want the ability to take advantage of such events with your international eCommerce, so that you can run promotions which really build rapport with the end users and help them see your part of their community. This is achieved by offering users special discounts that acknowledge the holiday, and even encourage them to benefit during these special events as a form of recognition. The core concept is that you want to make sure everything runs smoothly with the rest of your international eCommerce application, even when you are running specialized promotions for holidays, traditions and specific events that are occurring.

Extending the Functionality Beyond Typical Holidays and Celebrations

Apart from official holidays, it is also possible to target large events themselves within your international eCommerce presence. You may choose to target large conventions or meetings that take place locations. It is important to be able to accomplish this with much more than just a coupon code. The optimal execution involves the ability to intelligently determine the physical location of users, their region, and then possibly employ some form of detailed individualized recognition based on users logging in or using a coupon code. The key question here is: does the international eCommerce platform you already have, or consider owning, come with the capability of performing this type of targeting?

An additional aspect that can be challenging is to deal with the actual logistics around processing order fulfillment, managing shipping, and dealing with overall workflows for big holidays in a region. On the flip side of having a sale and promotion, you may also come across a puzzling scenario. Perhaps in a region, based on certain events, the shipping or fulfillment is going to be delayed. In this case, we want to be able to continue to operate the business full steam ahead with all the other regions and countries, but then make a workflow exception for this region.

Thus, the question would be whether your international eCommerce allows for this kind of "quarantine" of the issue, so that it does not apply to the entire site. The incident is really isolated and specific to that region that is currently impacted by any delays in shipping or service closures. It ultimately should not have an impact anywhere else on your international eCommerce operation.

Empower Users & Build Awareness by Enabling Messaging

Finally, one of the key components of any type of promotion, and generally any type of positive or negative event management, is to enable messaging. In other words, being able to set up transactional messages to individual users that then integrate with any updates and website user behavior.

So, if users click on something from a promotion, then we want to go ahead and keep that in front of them for the duration of the event. Maybe we also want to automatically apply a discount or make available additional follow ups, based on their type of interest or what we are interpreting as their interest. We want to create a buzz around different events and promotions for distinctive regional happenings that are occurring.

With this action, we are essentially enjoying free press and advertising, by allowing the local credibility to grow and build. Even if users do not click on anything and do not complete any kind of transactional processing in these regional areas, it's still possible to build a lot of rapport and credibility simply by acknowledging that local event or holiday.

This acknowledgement of the happening assists with brand growth and grants exposure, without really having to pay much -if any- overhead, because we are only sending out transactional emails to users. When they later come to the site, users will potentially be presented with special banner advertising, or calls to action with event-specific display. Thereby conveying the message that we are aware of the event and we are part of their community, focusing on the overall context of what the business is about and how it operates. We certainly encourage you to consider such capabilities as you evaluate your international eCommerce software.

Clarity: International eCommerce Experts

Our recommendation is to contemplate various specific scenarios regarding taking advantage of the different holidays, events, and local traditions. It is critical to investigate whether the international eCommerce platform you are appraising has the capability of incorporating these key tactical functionalities within events. Lastly, especially important is the ability to effectively isolate some of the specific overrides and changes by region, country, and by a date range as well.

Feel free to reach out to our team of friendly and knowledgeable experts, who will be happy to provide you with a complimentary review and assessment of your upcoming international eCommerce project. You are also welcome to visit any of the links below that pertain to international and global eCommerce. If you cannot find an answer for your specific question, you may click on the Ask the Expert button and promptly receive a detailed response. We would love to provide an answer and then post a genericized version on our website to inform future visitors.