Online shops getting ready for the end-of-year season

In the first half of 2016 online retail sales expanded by 18 percent to HUF 131 billion. Demand was the biggest for consumer electronics: these products were sold online in the value of HUF 11 billion. According to András Deák, director of Next Wave Europe’s smart commerce division, the Online Shopping Day in October and Black Friday in November are excellent test periods for the Christmas high season. Those retailers who can perform well on these days have an excellent chance for doing well before Christmas, when many online retailers realise 40 percent of their annual sales.

The director’s advice to online shops is that in these special periods they should stop all development projects and focus on supporting tasks, such as rapid error correction. It is a great idea for retailers to buy something in their own online shop from time to time, to see what customers experience from registering to receiving the product. He thinks it is very useful to prepare a business continuity scenario, as online retailers can never known when do the website or the customer service become inaccessible, or when does a power cut occur in the warehouse.

Csaba Zajdó, managing director of WebShop-Experts told our magazine that online shop operators should ride Black Friday’s wave of success and its growing popularity. If they are unable to lure shoppers with major price reductions, they should at least try to make as many consumers register for their newsletter as possible (e.g. A big Hungarian online shop has managed to get almost 50,000 new registrants in just 6 days).

Gergely Őry, managing director of Játéknet.hu informed that last year was a great challenge from a logistic perspective, especially on the Online Shopping Day and on Black Friday. Because of this the company decided to transform their logistic processes. The end-of-year holiday season also raises workforce issues for the company. They try to solve this problem with temporary employment and leased workers. Játéknet.hu has been named Online Retailer of the Year several times.

MediaMarkt’s press department told us how they had increased the number of their logistic service provider partners. They also added new communication channels and decided to simplify the presently 4-stage payment procedure to a single-stage system. The website is also about to be updated, so that shoppers can find products faster and more easily.

Extreme Digital is also busy preparing for the end-of-year season. Managing director Balázs Várkonyi revealed that in the last two months of the year the company realises the sales of five average months combined. In 2016 they started building a new server farm and they also commenced expanding customer service and logistic capacities. In June the company launched a website where shopping is much faster and simpler than before. Last November-December Extreme Digital’s online sales increased by 50 percent if compared with the same period in 2014.

According to information from the Hungarian Post’s press department, in the Black Friday and Christmas periods they need to deal with 100,000-120,000 parcels a day instead of the daily average of 40,000-60,000. They told that parcels are processed faster if customers prepare them in accordance with the post’s general terms and conditions.

Ádám Bengyel, managing director of Foxpost reckons that in the high season, which starts with Black Friday, online shops find it hard to serve the increased number of customers. The parcel vending machine company calculates with 75-percent growth in turnover in the Christmas period. In the summer the company acquired one of their competitors, parcel vending machine business Webbox. Foxpost is also getting ready for the high season, when they also work at weekends, emptying and filling vending machines several times a day.