Flash sales—usually defined as a sale that lasts less than 24 hours—are THE new hot thing in ecommerce. And for good reason: Over the last two years, flash sale websites have grown exponentially, logging a 368% increase in monthly market share. Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Herman Leung sees flash sales as an important emerging trend for 2012, describing them as “social-based ecommerce” that is “driving a lot more ecommerce transactions.”
These days nearly every retailer wants in on the flash sale business, but a variety of complex IT hurdles have kept “traditional” ecommerce stores out of the fray. Creating a new flash sale site to complement your existing business is challenging and doesn’t always make sense. In fact, the majority of people surveyed in a recent Compete.com study cited “reputation as the most important feature of a flash-sale site.”
It’s often better to integrate flash sales into your existing ecommerce site than create a whole new flash sale branch of your business. Yet, to date, there has been no simple way to integrate flash sales into your online store. Until now.
With Monetate, you can easily roll out a flash sale on your website, without having to engage your IT department. Here’s how it works, using as an example a recent flash sale one of our customers ran:
1) On the day of the flash sale, send an email to your rewards members. Include the time of sale, the shipping offer, and a coupon code needed to trigger the flash sale prices.
2) When a customer clicks through from the email to the website, the email creative is echoed site-wide on all pages.
3) For products included in the flash sale, dynamically add product badges that reflect the flash sale price or discount percentage.
4) When your customers go to checkout, dynamically apply the flash sale coupon code and customers receive the flash sale price.
5) However, if visitors see the flash sale email after the sale has concluded, but click through to the website anyway, they’ll see a banner noting that the flash sale has ended.