How Should The Big Electricity Providers Cope With The Shopping Season?

Retailers spend a whole year fighting for the most important holiday of the year.

Season.

Reporters learned from recent reports in the US media that according to the statistics of the US Retail Federation (NRF), November and December were the most critical periods of retail sales, accounting for 30% of the annual sales volume of many retailers.

According to NRF data, shoppers are expected to spend $655 billion 800 million in the two months of this year, an increase of 3.6% over last year's spending.

And electricity sales are expected to increase by 7% to 10% over last year, up to $117 billion.

This means that if there is a web site failure, even if it is just a few minutes, or a popular item is out of stock.

It could cause millions of dollars in sales losses to the company.

Therefore, retailers must remain relaxed throughout the year to get through the year-end peak season.

For WAL-MART, Target and

This means overhauling the website and shopping app, speeding up the efficiency of logistics distribution, and using predictive analysis to determine the need to store a suitable quantity of product inventory to cope with this busy holiday season.

Target

Last year, Target recorded a record sales of electricity providers on Thanksgiving Day, so it has been focused on ensuring that its Web site can run seamlessly during the holiday season over the past year.

Target says it has already done so.

The website has made "huge" changes to speed up the checkout process and enable the website to run more smoothly on desktop computers, tablet PCs and smart phones.

At the same time, Target also increased by 15% toy category last year, because the holiday season accounted for 50% of Target toy sales.

Target spokesman Eddie Baeb said: "we made changes to the back-end platform to improve daily functions such as account management and checkout, and to improve the capacity and flexibility of the platform, so as to prepare for the holiday season.

Another major change is that Target has also accelerated the delivery speed of online orders. "

Specifically, the number of Target stores that support shipments has doubled.

At present, 1000 of Target's 1800 stores in the United States can support online order delivery.

Target executives say that with this change, Target's offline stores are now expected to handle more than half of online orders during the holiday season.

This not only reduces the shipping time, but also reduces the cost of Target, because the package does not have to carry a long distance.

"With more support from offline stores, Target will be able to handle more online orders, share workload and improve the average delivery time during the festival," Baeb said.

WAL-MART

At the same time, WAL-MART has been working to expand the scope of its online products.

Walmart has doubled its online products to 20 million since last year.

"In the next few months, the company will add millions of new products," Walmart said.

In order to prevent customers from being overwhelmed with all new products, WAL-MART has improved its recommendation engine.

So far, the interaction rate between customers and the recommended products on WAL-MART website has increased by 20%.

WAL-MART also launched a new software called Electrode to help its web pages load up by 33%.

But WAL-MART not only wants the website to load quickly, but it also needs to prevent web pages from collapsing.

The company said that from Thanksgiving to the Internet Monday, WAL-MART expects its website to have 10 times more traffic.

So WAL-MART developed a software called OneOps that can handle peak traffic on multiple cloud processors, rather than single clouds, to avoid website downtime.

In order to ensure that the website can work normally, WAL-MART has tested the website in the past few days on the pressure of exceeding the expected traffic volume of the website through the application of the website to WAL-MART.

In addition, WAL-MART is trying to shorten the delivery time this year.

The number of online order logistics centers has increased from five warehouses last year to 10 this year.

Customers can also pick up goods in WAL-MART's physical stores.

Last year, WAL-MART received orders for more than five times a day in the store during the holiday season.

Therefore, WAL-MART is expanding its recruitment of employees who are responsible for online order delivery services.

This is the first time WAL-MART has added a special "pick up" manager to every store.

Amazon

Amazon is also increasing its demand for holiday orders.

This year, Amazon hired 120 thousand temporary workers during the holidays, an increase of 20% over the 100 thousand temporary workers employed last year.

Meanwhile, in order to prepare for the holiday season, Amazon has also focused on improving its mobile shopping app this year, making it easier for customers to shop and compare prices in stores.

In addition, WAL-MART has expanded the categories of shoppers to scan bar codes. By scanning barcodes, customers can compare prices in stores with those on Amazon.

This year, WAL-MART's app also provides a tool called "watch a deal": once a particular holiday special item is available for purchase, the tool will automatically remind shoppers.

According to WAL-MART, 7 of the 10 Amazon customers used mobile devices during the holiday season last year.

While Target, WAL-MART, Amazon and other retailers are preparing for the peak season, major logistics companies are also actively preparing for the upcoming package.

The US Postal Services Corporation expects to distribute 750 million packages in the holiday season this year, which is equivalent to 5 million packages per day, an increase of 12% over the same period last year, 670 million.