I don't wanna brag, but here at FenixCommerce marketing, we have cool jobs. Not only do we get to help eCommerce sellers understand the huge potential to improve conversion (and a bunch of other eCommerce business metrics) by optimizing their delivery experience - we get to actually see the results when they do.
And for eCommerce sellers, there's perhaps no more important time of year to improve those business metrics than the holiday season. Which is why we're especially excited with the results of our analysis of FenixCommerce holiday data (spoiler alert #1: it shows that our Intelligent Delivery Platform had a significant positive impact on both conversion and revenue for our clients that deployed it for the 2019 holiday season).
If you're a visual type, you can find our infographic detailing 2018-2019 year-over-year sales and conversion improvement statistics for a subset of our clients here. But I'd encourage you to read on, since I'll provide a bit more detail around the various stats in this blog post.
Everyone expected eCommerce revenues to increase in the 2019 holiday selling season. Based on our our analysis of the data, we're predicting the increase will be about 19%, or $24B. That 19% - representing an average across all eComm - will be important to keep in mind as we dig deeper into the FenixCommerce numbers.
Another number to keep in mind is average conversion across eComm stores, which is 2.04% according to our friends at Growcode.com (they also awesomely provide a breakdown by category in this article if you are interested).
Like any massive, multi-dimensional dataset, the challenge with our holiday sales data was making it comprehensible. We decided to do that by taking a few different cuts.
First, we looked at the two metrics we figured would be nearest and dearest to any eComm seller's heart: year-over-year gross revenue and conversion.
Next, because we're a startup merely dating back to the dawn of interstellar space travel, we realized our data set serendipitously contained some clients who were on the platform for both the holiday 2018 and holiday 2019 seasons, and some who joined later so were only on for the 2019 season. Hmmmmmm.
And finally, we noticed that our data not only covered a bunch of interesting metrics--including those uber-interesting sales and conversion stats--but that we could analyze it based on any time periods we wanted to. So we decided to go with:
This approach allowed us to look at how shoppers broke up their shopping in the two very different seasons - spending more later in 2019, the tighter season, than in 2018. Spoiler alert #2: this made for a big impact on conversion (and a strong data point in support of the FenixCommerce conversion improvement value prop) in 2019.
The first cut at our data includes all the companies we included in the study, e.g. without regard for whether they used the platform only in 2019 or in both 2018 and 2019:
The numbers are strong across the board here, with year-over-year gross daily revenue basically doubling in every period, and nice conversion bumps in 2019 as well.
In this group we start to see the impact of the unusual timing of the 2019 eCommerce holiday season. While gross daily revenue was up across all time periods for this group, notice the slight dropoff in conversion in the "Rest Of Holiday" timeframe (e.g. from the day after cyber Monday until 12/23/19). It may be that, due to the shorter ROH period in 2019, more people planned ahead and bought earlier in the season, and so were slightly less likely to convert later on. Given that this group had the IDP running both years, it's encouraging to see the huge conversion jump in the BFCM period--and the healthy revenue gains across all the periods.
This was our biggest cohort, and produced the most interesting data:
The immediate standout here is that unlike the former group, shoppers of these clients seemed to have shifted a lot of their purchasing to AFTER the BFCM timeframe, registering lower conversion rates (but still double the revenue numbers) during BFCM, with numbers for ROH and the entire period markedly stronger in 2019 than 2018. Perhaps the customers of later FenixCommerce adopters are procrastinators!
Of course - in the spirit of our core value of transparency - we can't take credit for all of the increases shown here. Our eCommerce clients tend to be innovative, growing eCommerce companies who have a number of conversion and revenue enhancing activities going on at any given time. But given the IDP's consistent conversion improvement track record (our clients see on average a 10% conversion increase), we'll take some credit for these awesome year-over-year numbers - and look forward to doing this analysis again next January!
