How to sell more games this Black Friday – eebz

Peter Laughton, CEO of eebz, explains how you can make the most of special sales events with the aid of the right tools and some clever optimisation techniques…

With its origins in North America, Black Friday is now an established part of the international retail calendar. And 2021 is set to be a bumper year in the post-pandemic world.

In the UK, research conducted by Future’s The Lens panel indicated that 82 per cent of Brits will be the same or more engaged in Black Friday in 2021.

54 per cent of those 2,000 respondents stated they will make their purchases online, with online marketplaces, brand websites and online independent stores taking the top three positions for shoppers’ journeys. Moreover, 42 per cent said they will use Black Friday shopping for this year’s Christmas gifts.

A quarter are expecting their Christmas and/or Black Friday budgets to increase, with over 70 per cent having the same amount of more money to spend on Black Friday and 78 per cent having the same amount for Christmas, compared to 2020.

With the research estimating that the UK population has £198bn in lockdown savings, 82 per cent of the panel said they will spend this partially or fully on Christmas or Black Friday.

Competition for consumer eyeballs in 2021 will be extremely fierce. Ensuring your games are visible in online stores is critical.

So let’s recap some of the approaches we’ve touched on in our previous articles, namely the Four Pillars of Visibility that will help keep you front of both the store and minds.

1/ SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) – This is all about the retailer website search engines. Put simply, the higher your product ranks on a retailer website, the more likely it’ll be considered for purchase. This means optimising your product name and titles in store listings, factoring in local translations, generic vs brand names, special characters, or being aware that a retailer itself is choosing to use Spiderman instead of Spider-Man.

2/ Product Landing Page Ranking – Product Landing Pages (PLPs) don’t just rank products by sales volume. If that were the case, new releases would never have a chance to be found and sold. In reality, PLPs are ranking products by various criteria, which are often not even known to the retailer’s own buyers. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to influence the ranking of a product within the PLP, using tactics such as re-release, promotions or a name change – constant monitoring is key to increasing and maintaining sales.

3/ Recommendations – There is no more powerful sales tool than peers recommending a game to each other. On e-commerce sites, recommendation panels are often found down the bottom
of a product listing –they’re essentially the ‘gondola end’ of the online world. Crucially, recommendation panels are for the
most part yet to be commercialised by retailers. So they
represent a great opportunity to boost sales using some
simple optimisation techniques.

4/ Search Word Accuracy – You need to understand how shoppers search for your game online. Use those keywords in your title or description to ensure that the search engines will produce results with your games near the top. In Russia, for example, Spider-man is usually listed as ‘Chelovek-Pauk’ – so if a consumer searches in English and you haven’t optimised the listing with the Russian title too, the chances are the retailer/platform search engine will not display the game

Keeping on top of the Four Pillars is not easy. Moreover, ‘offer fluidity’ needs to be considered as part of the online shopping experience: not only are deals everywhere during Black Friday, but prices and product availability are fluctuating constantly.

You’ll need the right tools in order to spot those movements and adjust your own offers immediately, based on real time demand and the competitive environment. Factoring in live information across all retail partners and competitors for all your products, including pricing, stock availability, ranking position and more.

eebz’ solutions can help you implement the above techniques to ensure you stay on top of your competitors – not just on Black Friday, but 24/7 across the world.

eebz is the world’s premier product relationship management system that integrates bricks and mortar, e-commerce and digital channels on an equal footing.

To find out more, visit www.eebz.com, or contact eebz to get unique Black Friday insights for your products.  email info@eebz.com or call 020 3886 0265