Chinese New Year 2021- Stats and Strategies to Prepare Your Store

The Chinese new year is the most awaited family time and a grand celebration. As a seller it might bother you how I will manage order delivery when almost all suppliers and workers (largest migration on the planet to reunite with family members) will be celebrating the Chinese new year?

Don’t panic; this post will uncover the strategies to smoothly handle the Chinese new year’s impact and how not to ruin the customer experience. Let’s unfold them one by one.

Avoid Website Downtime to Avoid Decline in Sales

Test your server to ensure it can handle an abrupt surge in traffic a few days before the festive season. After all, server downtime leads to customers being unable to access your store. Don’t let it happen during the festive season. It is a big mood spoiler and very infuriating . Few frustrated customers might poorly rate your site for killing the joy of shopping ahead of the festive season.

• Shared hosting is not recommended at all. In case of a sudden traffic surge (which is obvious during the festive season), your store can be suspended by the provider citing other websites’ protection on the server as the reason.
• Employ a CDN (content delivery network) to ensure customers can access the store despite the site being down.
• Backup your site data (the cloud is a better option), and it will save your data during the crucial time.
• Keep your site security feature updated; otherwise; you might end up inviting malicious attacks. These attacks send a high amount of fake traffic to your store. Hence, your store goes down during peak hours of the Chinese new year. Therefore, delivering an excellent customer experience will be a hard nut to crack.
• Either purchase the domain for a long time or set it to auto-renewal mode. Therefore, no need to face a service outage as a result of domain expiry.

Service downtime during the Chinese new year is a serious issue. It will put off your customers, and they might switch to another store for shopping if downtime is too high.

Planning Ahead Helps You Stay Ahead of the Competitors during Chinese New Year

Chinese Workers are on Week Off How to Handle Order Delay

• Without delay, contact your suppliers and discuss the exact dates of stopping the operation and restarting it after the Chinese new year. Accordingly, inform your customers beforehand about the inability to deliver the products during that time. You can do it in the form of a banner on the store’s homepage.
• Some customers will directly land on the google SERPs’ product page (if your store is fully SEO optimized). They won’t probably visit the home page or might be in too hurry to see the banner. Therefore, include possible order delays in the product description or on the checkout page.

• Another effective way is to approach non-chinese suppliers who won’t stop manufacturing during the festive season. Partnering with them means you don’t have to say no to customers due to stock unavailability.
• More importantly, be active on social media and respond to email as early as possible. It will allow you to keep customers informed as well as counter negative emotions among your customers.
• One more way is to hide those items temporarily.

The Pro Tip: Procure your top selling products by requesting them from the suppliers in advance and store them in your warehouse. As a result, you will never run out of inventory even if the supplier is on leave.

What If My Customers Still Remain Unaware of Shipping Delay?

It doesn’t surprise that there will always be a handful of customers missing out on this information. It doesn’t mean your efforts are in vain. Moreover, you still have an opportunity to help them out. Hence, they don’t feel frustrated due to the lack of prior shipping delay information.

These customers will call you or ping over social media. You have to politely apologize for the delay, inform about the delay cause and reassure about putting best efforts to decrease the delay.

What To Sell During Chinese New Year 2021?

It is one of the most important and interesting questions. After all, shoppers are eager to spend more than $200 billion US dollars in 2021.

• High Demand for household items and clothes owing to 3 in 10 customers are planning to buy them.
• As per Statista, smart devices are among the most desirable gifts during Chinese new year for 39 percent of Chinese customers (aged 31-40) in 2021.
• Chinese consumers have recently shown an inclination towards branded goods and luxury products. Two important factors to focus on during the Chinese new year. The shift in purchasing patterns among chinese consumers is owing to increasing disposable income.
• 61 percent of Chinese shoppers prefer foreign brands for childcare products, maternity items, and cosmetic products.

The Pro Tip: Last year’s sales data of the store is a helpful resource. It will help you decode high demand items during this period of the year.

What are Decisive Factors for High Conversion During Chinese New Year

image credit: Statista

The above stats reveal product quality is the most important consideration that affects the buying pattern for 56 percent Chinese customers.

Image: Statista

Brand love is scaling new heights of popularity among chinese customers. 57 percent chinese consumers will prefer top-notch brands during CNY 2021. Millennials form the majority of brand lovers. Therefore, listing branded products on your e-commerce website is an effective way to extend your business outreach to millennials during the Chinese new year.

Targeting Chinese customers in the 30-39 yrs age group will be a profitable strategy. After all, they will spend up to 426 US dollars on gifts (with smart devices as their first choice) this year.

Leverage Singaporeans Chinese New Year Enthusiasm to Elevate Sales

• Chinese new year being a grand celebration but Singaporeans seem to be far more deeply into it. They start planning at least several days ahead of it. They scour the internet with the Chinese new year holiday keyword.

image credit: Google Trends

• Plan your pre festival marketing strategies with Chinese new year holiday in focus. It will help your products achieve higher visibility and attract quality leads.
• Singaporeans also display a deep interest in Chinese new year promotions by being ahead of others searching for the keyword “CNY promotions.”
• Therefore, target Singaporeans (and Malaysians, they also have considerable enthusiasm for CNY ) by optimizing your product page(if you have a Singapore specific (.sg ) page on the store) and Singapore specific product ads with CNY promotion as primary keyword. As a result, you will experience a high conversion rate.

The Pro Tip: Chinese have special fascination with micro video clips. Product promotion with short videos on product pages and social media will fetch more engagement from customers.

Few More Good To Know Points for Better Sales During Chinese New Year

• The Chinese new year 2021 is the year of the ox. Listing ox related items will get special attention.

Image credit: https://twitter.com/sushipenguin_

• The festive season is the most suitable opportunity to tap into customers’ emotions. Developing an emotional connection with your brand will help you with positive reviews on existing products and right feedback on new products.
• Helping your target audience plan the Chinese new year with a step by step guide on cooking, gifts, decorations will be deeply appreciated. It will build a new customer base for your store. After all you are lessening the hassle and saving time with useful content intended to make the celebration a grand affair.
• Automating your store using the marketplace integration solutions will ensure you sell hassle free on leading e-commerce marketplaces.
• Keeping the theme of your store associated with red and ox will impress the Chinese customers. After all, it reflects your soft corner for the Chinese new year.

Make a customer feel valued during their festive season, and they will be loyal to your brand without hesitation.

Chinese New Year is a Blessing Not Burden for Online Sellers

The figures favor great opportunities for online merchants that are going to unravel during the Chinese new year, aka the spring festival.

Besides focusing on the above points, do remember that suppliers don’t take a month long leave. Therefore, shutting down your store during the Chinese new year ain’t a good idea. Finding your store closed customers will not appreciate it. It might divert your customers to your competitors.

Hence, equip your store like a pro merchant to amaze your customers during the Chinese new year. Above all, restricted purchase last year during the Chinese new year due to pandemic means a rise in spending during the festival is highly likely to happen.