Only 4 years have gone by since French company Vente-privee.com became the first online private sales site to offer member only flash sales. This little revolution might have gone unnoticed to some but only a few years later this $3B industry has now more than 500 players around the world, the world of ecommerce that is.
This phenomenal growth isn’t the result of sheer luck and in a way, it makes perfect sense when you look at the facts. Even if today’s private sales offer a wide range of products from electronics to real estate, the really successful ones managed to gain spectacular growth by targeting one specific consumer, the one in charge of household spending: women. By targeting women, private sales also dictate what products are most susceptible to succeed in a flash sale. That’s why those that offer fashion, clothing and Home décor flash sales are amongst the most popular.
The success of private sales revolves around four concepts:
Daily habits:
In the world of private sales, 75% of sales come from repeat shoppers. New flash sales, that take only a few minutes to review, become available each day and customers are happy to include this moment in their daily routine, not unlike reading your morning newsletters.
Curated Solutions:
Because private sales are so exclusive and each of them is a happening in itself, customers have come to expect only the best. Not everything is available in a private sale, only the best is available. One of the great challenges of ecommerce is to find a way for customers to break the touch and feel barrier and offering the best available product can help resolve this issue.
Urgency & Fun:
A flash sale isn’t forever. It’s gone, well, in a flash. Customers can’t stare at a product page for hours and hours trying to decide if they’re buying or not. With the flash sale, quantities are limited and time is running short. Customers need to act quickly or someone else will get it. This makes flash sales fun and exciting and extremely rewarding for consumers because not only have they acquired something great for themselves, they’re also the winner in a race against thousands of other customers.
Social Commerce:
Women drive 62% of commenting on Facebook. They have a bigger influence circle and bigger networking effect. These facts, combined with the exclusive nature of private sales (each member usually needs to be referred by another member to get in), give a social aspect to shopping. Consumers don’t shop alone anymore. They share tips, they comment on their latest acquisition, they invite members of their own circle to join and pretty soon you get a ‘’Black Friday effect’’ where the site, flash sales and products are promoted by the users themselves.
Private sales are marketing platforms. They are huge communication tools that allow users to revolve around specific types of goods and share their enthusiasm with their inner circle. Because there is a lot of unique merchandise involved, because managing the supply chains can be tricky and because sales are generated inside a short window, these platforms must be driven by the best technology available.
With a benchmark of over 250 000 uploaded products, flash promotion tools, newsletters and flyers and a robust technology capable of handling sudden increases in traffic, our k-eCommerce solution combined with its private sales module makes it one of the leading platform out there.
[...] “What makes private sales so attractive?”, E-Commerce Blog, June 29, 2011, http://www.k-ecommerce.com/blog/239-what-makes-private-sales-so-attractive.php (November 10, [...]