Sales galore: Shoppers mill about a Taylor Swift display at a Target store in New Jersey. The company is offering 50% off thousands of items including video games, home decor and other items with a two-day Cyber Monday sale. — Reuters
NEW YORK: After lacklustre spending at US stores on a deals-heavy Black Friday, retailers are pulling out all the stops with steep promotions and discounts on their websites and apps to entice people to buy holiday gifts and other merchandise after the long Thanksgiving weekend.
Retailers were coaxing cautious US shoppers on Cyber Monday – traditionally America’s biggest Internet shopping day – with push notifications, emails and other ads touting heavily discounted cosmetics, electronics, toys, clothing and other products.
With just 20-odd days before Christmas, the discounts this year have been deeper, with shoppers waiting for promotion-heavy days, experts have said.
For instance, Target said it was offering 50% off thousands of items including video games, home decor and other technology items with a “two-day Cyber Monday” sale that started on Sunday.
The moves followed a mixed holiday season so far, with muted spending in stores on key shopping days such as Black Friday.
Sales at brick-and-mortar stores last Friday grew just 0.7% year-on-year, according to preliminary estimates by payments processor Mastercard. Meanwhile, data firm Facteus said sales were actually lower.
Online retailers like Walmart and Amazon have relied on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) customer service and search features to make it easier for shoppers to find products on websites and mobile apps.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, resident Cheyenne Berens, 29, has been using Amazon’s GenAI chatbot Rufus to track prices of baby merchandise and electronics this holiday season.
Amazon launched Rufus in February to give customers product recommendations and details based on its entire catalog of merchandise.
“I have found that using Rufus on Amazon has been extremely helpful in determining whether a ‘deal’ is actually a ‘deal’,” Berens said.
She’s been tracking the fluctuating prices of a Pack ‘n’ Play portable playpen and waiting for the right time to buy. The price started at US$90 before the holidays, briefly rose to US$120 and dropped back to US$90, she said.
Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce, a cloud-computing company that tracks global shopping data from more than 1.5 billion consumers, said that GenAI tools such as chatbots to answer online shoppers’ basic questions, such as queries about products, helped retailers protect their profit margins despite rising costs.
Last Saturday, retailers using GenAI tools for customer service saw a 15% higher purchase rate by users, according to estimates by Salesforce.
Consumers were expected to spend US$13.2bil to US$13.5bil online on Monday in the United States, according to preliminary estimates from Adobe Inc.
That outlay would follow the roughly US$10.8bil Americans spent online on Black Friday, according to Adobe.
Traffic to retail sites from chatbots or shoppers clicking on a link to a website rose 1,800% from Black Friday through the weekend, Adobe said.
With many Americans recently carrying more debt, many are using third-party “buy now, pay later” services, with spending on the services likely to approach US$1bil, according to projections by Adobe, which keeps track of devices that use its software to help power more than one trillion visits to US retail sites. — Reuters
