As the US Thanksgiving season wrapped up with flat sales, retailers are trying to lure in customers with a wide range of promotions and discounts on cosmetics, electronics, toys, clothing and other merchandise for Cyber Monday, America’s biggest online shopping event. Retailers have been strategizing to pull in US shoppers with notifications, mails and other heavily touted ads.
With a little more than three weeks before Christmas, experts say this year’s discounts have been steeper, as shoppers are holding out for days packed with promotions. Retail chain Target, announced a “two-day Cyber Monday” starting on Sunday, offering 50 per cent discount off thousands of items that included video games, home decor and other technology.
According to preliminary estimates from payments processor Mastercard, sales at brick-and-mortar stores on Friday increased by only 0.7 per cent compared to last year. Meanwhile, data firm Facteus reported that sales were actually down.
In order to make it easier to help shoppers find their products on websites and mobile apps, Amazon, Walmart and other online retailers relied on generative AI customer service and search features. Cheyenne Berens, a 29-year-old resident of Pittsburgh, also used Amazon’s generative AI chatbot services to track price of merchandise, as quoted by Reuters.
“I have found that using Rufus on Amazon has been extremely helpful in determining whether a ‘deal’ is actually a ‘deal’,” Berens said.
Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce which is a cloud computing company that monitors global shopping data from over 1.5 billion consumers, explained that GenAI tools, like chatbots that handle basic queries from online shoppers about products, have helped retailers safeguard their profit margins despite increasing costs.
He also noted that, according to Salesforce estimates, retailers who utilized GenAI tools for customer service experienced a 15 per cent higher purchase rate among users on Saturday. Schwartz said that the higher conversion rate acted as “a game changer.”
According to preliminary estimates from Adobe Inc., online spending in the United States on Monday is projected to hit $13.2 billion, a 6 per cent increase from Cyber Monday last year. This follows the approximately $10.8 billion Americans spent online on Black Friday, as reported by Adobe.
Adobe reported that traffic to retail sites from chatbots or shoppers clicking on website links increased by 1,800 per cent from Black Friday through the weekend
With many Americans taking on more debt, most are turning to third-party ‘buy now, pay later’ services, and spending on these services is expected to reach $1 billion, according to Adobe projections. Adobe tracks devices using its software, which powers over 1 trillion visits to US retail sites.