5 eCommerce Lessons to Learn from CNY 2021

Chinese New Year, one of the busiest holidays of the year, is drawing to a close after a fulfilling 15-day celebration. If you run an eCommerce business, now is the perfect time to step back and analyse how successful your Chinese New Year campaign has been in terms of sales and marketing. Whether it was offering a special festive discount code or ramping up your digital marketing strategy, you probably gained new visitors from your efforts. Many businesses struggle to account for the higher traffic and surge in orders during holidays and sales. The recent CNY has left us some eCommerce lessons that we can use to help improve our operations.

In this article, we share 5 common lessons to make sure your business is equipped for the next big holiday and Chinese New Year 2022.  

1. Know the timeline

Even before there were constraints brought by the pandemic, some suppliers started to shut down operations a month early. So, knowing your suppliers’ schedule for CNY is one of the eCommerce lessons we’ve learnt.

Understand when exactly your suppliers will close, reopen and when they will stop accepting orders in advance of the shutdown. Even just one supplier closing a few days earlier than assumed could result in an unexpected shutdown of your entire supply chain process. 

We encourage you to prepare by communicating well with your supplier to confirm their schedule for the CNY holiday. By doing this, you will be able to avoid delays in operation and your CNY campaign will run smoothly. 

2. Place an order early

This year was definitely different because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With all the changes we had to adapt to in the past year, preparing for the unexpected is also one of the eCommerce lessons we learnt. For most businesses, that means placing your order earlier than you usually would especially during Chinese New Year. 

Factories aren’t the only businesses that will shut down during the holidays, shipping and other transportation companies may include additional fees for the holiday period. You save yourself from paying more by shipping early. Placing your order a month before CNY also ensures your order is out of China before businesses begin to close. 

3. Get your logistics in order

We also learnt that getting your logistics in order also plays a vital role to have a successful CNY campaign. Mainly because you will be ordering more to cope with the increase in the demand. To ensure that your products will be delivered on time, you should be able to navigate border clearance requirements early. 

Transportation demands will definitely increase. Customs clearance agencies usually experience delays because of the holiday. Providing a forecast of your expected cargo to your shipper’s representative will allow you to assess important factors in your operations. 

Inform your shipper about your priority shipments in case spaces are limited. It will also help to reserve space on passenger flights for shipments that cannot be delayed. The rates will be slightly higher but taking this measure will help keep your supply chain running. 

4. Improve your website’s navigation 

One of the vital ecommerce lessons is to make sure that the state of your website is not overlooked. This will allow your site to accommodate the increase in site visitors. Aside from having a quick homepage, your product pages, category pages and shopping cart’s load speeds matter just as much. 

Taking a day or two to test run your website and improve its load speed can help you avoid losing customers during checkout. There are effective tools available to help you with this. Google Page Speed Insights is a great resource to start with. It provides an in-depth report that looks at specific areas of your site that may be causing loading issues. 

Make sure that your site is also up to date. Updating your website is important all the time, but it becomes especially important for a major holiday like CNY as you’re expecting a flood of new visitors. Make sure to update your themes, plugins, etc. as well. You may check this article to learn how to make a great website. 

5. Prepare for a surge in queries, returns and refunds

As is the case with every holiday, Chinese New Year will be hectic so you should be ready for a surge in queries, returns and refunds. More orders and bigger orders may result in overloaded suppliers, dropshipping and a strain on eCommerce businesses. 

Being prepared for these issues is very crucial for a successful Chinese New Year campaign. This process can be easily managed with the help of some useful Shopify apps. However, communicating with your customers should be a priority. This is an important eCommerce lesson not only for CNY but for other major holidays as well.

You may consider including a chatbot to your site or you may hire a virtual assistant to help you answer and manage queries. It will also help to prepare a list of frequently asked questions and their answers for a quick and effective interaction.