Every day, Shopbot helps millions of shoppers on the web research, compare prices and buy online in a matter of clicks. Their shopping platform brings together more than 50 million online shoppers and over 15 million online products across the globe.
How big of an event is Black Friday for Shopbot in Canada? What impact has the event had on your business in previous years?
Black Friday has always been a pretty big event for us. It has actually become so huge that we launched a sub-brand called Black Friday Discount to exclusively focus on Black Friday. Between Shopbot and Black Friday Discount, Black Friday is the busiest day of the year for us. On Shopbot, we see 504% more daily users and a 383% increase in sales when Black Friday comes around. Similarly, November is when 95% of our users pay us a visit on Black Friday Discount. So, it’s a bit of an important time for us to say the least.
What exclusive offers or plans do you have for Black Friday 2017? Will you also be participating in Cyber Monday? How will your promotions or approach differ between the two retail holidays?
As we were mentioning, we’ve kind of gone all in on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday with Black Friday Discount. Still, our approach for each retail holiday will be a little bit different. Even though Black Friday is moving more and more online, you have to respect the fact that it’s still one of the biggest offline shopping events of the year. That’s why we try to strike a balance between bringing our online users some sweet sales and giving those who want to do their shopping in-person the info they need to make the most of Black Friday at their local malls. Cyber Monday is a bit more straightforward. Since it’s an online-only event, we concentrate on bringing our users as of many great deals as we can find.
Which products do you expect to be the biggest sellers?
Traditionally, the most popular products have been laptops, smartphones, video games, and TVs. We don’t think there’s going to be a radical change in that trend this year. If we had to choose one product that we’d put our money on to be one of the best sellers, if not the top, on Black Friday, it would be the Samsung Galaxy S8. Other than that, there’s the usual suspects that are pretty popular around this time: iPhones, MacBooks, the PlayStation 4 (although the new Xbox One X may change that,) and Samsung LCD TVs.
Is there a specific type of affiliate you see as the biggest star this holiday season (influencers, coupon and cashback sites, bloggers, etc.)? Have you seen any unique or creative promotional methods?
We’re probably a little biased but we think that product and price comparison sites like ours will be the most popular this holiday season. There are a ton of deals from stores this time. It’s really hard to keep track of what’s happening where. Price and product comparison sites like us are able to bring a lot of these deals together in a single location. Obviously, that makes shopping and comparing sales way easier for customers. So, it’s only natural for them to come our way. On the other hand, influencers could also be a pretty influential (pun intended) force this year. That could be especially true if the influencer is pushing a product that’s perfect for their fan base.
We haven’t seen anything too revolutionary when it comes to promotional campaigns just yet. The key word being “yet.” We think that we’ll see some cool new campaigns making their debuts as Black Friday gets a little closer.
What are your overall predictions for Black Friday/Cyber Weekend in your market?
We’re expecting this year to be the biggest Black Friday yet! Traffic on our sites during Black Friday has been rising consistently since 2012, and there are no signs that point to that trend changing this year. A lot has been made of the “death of Black Friday.” Generally, we’ve found that the downward trends are related to in-store shopping. Based on our data, it seems like more people are choosing to shop online instead. Obviously, that’s great news for us.
What are some benefits for advertisers working with your brand in Q4?
Q4 is by far our biggest quarter of the year. Not only do we receive a huge boost in users, we also see a huge rise in sales. That means that we’re getting a ton of traffic from users who are ready to buy. If you’re an advertiser who’s looking to stay ahead of your competitors, it’s a pretty good time to start working with us.
Since we’ve been doing this for a while, we’ve gotten pretty good at Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day… We could go on. That should be obvious after we’ve introduced our Black Friday Discount specialty brand, in addition to Shopbot. With this being the most important shopping season of the year, it’s nice to know that you’re working with someone who’s continuing to grow their abilities to attract more shoppers during this critical time.
What are some of your best practices for engaging affiliates/users during Q4?
We focus on building great relationships with our affiliates. That’s why we concentrate on reaching out to our affiliates’ account managers to see if they have any ideas on how we can better work together. Whether that’s learning about their newest products or listening to their suggestions on how we can better present those products to our users, they inspire us to think up and test different ideas that improve our sites for our users and the sales for our affiliates. Talk about a win-win.
How does Awin play a role in your Q4 success?
Awin helps us to build meaningful relationships with our retail partners. We’ve found the Awin interface to be very user-friendly, while their employees have done a great job in connecting us with brands who want to work with us. We’ve been thrilled about some the partnerships that we’ve been able to establish over the past few years. Many of these partners have become key to our Q4 success. Hopefully, we’ll be able to partner with some more awesome brands during this year’s Q4.
What are some of your favorite features of the Awin platform?
The analytics and reporting on Awin are fantastic. It’s obvious that you’ve spent a lot of time understanding how publishers work and what’s important to us. With analytics that we can easily use to measure what’s working and what isn’t, we’re able to stay on the top of our game.
When we do run into trouble, the Publisher Help Center has been extremely valuable. We’re almost always able to get the answer to our problem immediately. We can’t afford to have things not working properly. So, we really appreciate Awin’s support.
Interested in partnering with Shopbot? Please contact our publisher management team.
