Black Friday and Christmas multichannel season off to a flying start over August Bank Holiday weekend

1 September 2017 | BlueBridge One

UK Black Friday now in 8th year… the story continues

The Christmas multichannel sales season kicked off over the August Bank Holiday weekend with major mid-market chains such as Tesco and those at the top of the market, such as John Lewis, featuring instore and online festive themes.

The current promotions launched the ongoing activity that is set to ratchet up the anticipation of the 4-day weekend period of Black Friday through to Cyber Monday at the end of November.

Black Friday 2017 falls on 24th November. It’s the eighth year that this has been recognised in the UK after it was pioneered here by Amazon in 2010. Since then, just about every multichannel business selling goods has had to participate, or face projecting the perception that it is getting left behind, or somehow not entering into the spirit of Christmas like Ebenezer Scrooge!

New Year sales likely even before the turkey is polished off

The 2016 period saw UK shoppers spend £5.8 billion, a 15% increase up on 2015. While the pound remains weak driving up prices of imported goods, savage discounting before Christmas and in the New Year’s sales (which are bound to kick-off before the Christmas turkey has been polished off!) is likely to be a strong trend.

Slimming margins with aggressive discounting means, that more than ever, multichannel businesses need to be highly efficient and that technology systems need to be truly joined up.

Co-ordinating activity instore, online and Click-and-Collect is a challenge in itself. However, it’s important to be able to accommodate alternative fulfilment and business models such as 3PL and drop-shipping. Such demands means that piecemeal solutions of different technology systems and applications held together with manual processes simply won’t do.

Maximising profit from seasonal multichannel with BlueBridge One

In the face of stiff competition, NetSuite ERP provides the end-to-end capability of connecting up all the different elements required for multichannel businesses to succeed in today’s world.

BlueBridge One is a NetSuite 5-Star Award winning system integrator with a compelling track record of delivering solutions that integrate and co-ordinate multichannel business processes. Once their operations are properly orchestrated through NetSuite, BlueBridge One’s multichannel and wholesale distribution customers enjoy new levels of efficiency that were previously unobtainable.

To see how our cloud ERP solutions transform efficiency to maximise profitability, simply get in touch today.

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