Black Friday

On November 26th, in exactly 10 days, a new edition of the Black Friday.

El Black Friday or Black Fridayor is it a commercial event of American origin that is held every year for a day: always on the last Friday of the month of November.

On the occasion of the opening of the Christmas shopping season, great discounts and offers are offered throughout Black Friday in large and small stores, both electronic and traditional.

Black Friday and the Last Mile

Given the enormous impact of this “Black Friday”, a large part of businesses are positively affected on this day, especially e-commerce. According to studies shown in Lobocom,”E-commerce companies increase their turnover by 35% on average during the week of Black Friday”. In addition, the fact about the comparison with Christmas shopping also stands out, “since The benefits may even exceed the Christmas campaign”.

In this regard, it should be noted that the month of November is the month of the year with the highest number of sales, thus surpassing the hitherto unbeatable months of December (Christmas campaign) or January (sales campaign).

In this way, and taking into account the great benefits and business repercussions of this important date, it is essential to formulate a strategy prior to Black Friday, in order to guarantee success in our company.

Preliminary market study

As we mentioned before, a prior approach is essential in addition to creating a strategy focused on Black Friday. Here are some of the key aspects you should consider when carrying out a previous study:

· Knowledge of market trends: know what the dynamics of the market are in terms of purchasing patterns, products or services most in demand or, even, purchase method (in-store pickup, home delivery, etc.), among others. Knowledge of all or some of these trends will help us to establish a more precise and, consequently, more beneficial strategy.

· Analysis of our consumers: in relation to market trends, it is also essential to know our own users or potential customers in depth. Knowing what they want, what they need and how they want to achieve it will provide us with a lot of information to direct a focused and efficient strategy.

· Black Friday marketing strategy: knowing the market and our potential consumers will help us to implement a marketing strategy focused solely and exclusively on Black Friday. Strategies such as email marketing campaigns in the previous days, publications on social networks or even banners and pop-ups within the website itself may be considered.

How to prepare your logistics last mile for a successful Black Friday

Given the enormous success of this “Black Friday” and the great impact on sales in practically all the stores participating in this “black day”, it is essential to establish a logistical preparation prior to this day.

For users, it is increasingly important to speed and efficiency in your purchases. Make a quick and convenient purchase: from anywhere (at home or from the beach) and receive it in the shortest possible time. This entire process is one of the most important aspects for users and one of the most difficult logistically for any company.

For this reason, implementing tools that facilitate logistics operations and, above all, help to efficiently manage delivery routes is vital on such a special date.

Here's how you should prepare for Black Friday in your store:

· Using specialized software in the last mile: the implementation of tools on such an important date as Black Friday will be a fundamental part of your company's commercial success. Tools such as SmartMonkey Planner they will help you to cope with this frenetic sales day in addition to Increase profits, because with Planner you'll plan routes in an intelligent way: the program itself will result in the fastest and most efficient routes in a matter of seconds. With efficient routes, you will not only have economic savings, due to lower fuel consumption, but also time savings, since you will carry out the most optimal route.

· Direct communication channels with your customers: direct communication with users is essential, since in the midst of the digital age, we are used to being constantly connected and informed. With the use of software such as Planner, your customers will be able to receive direct and real-time information about your purchases. For example, your customers will be able to know at all times where their order is or when they will receive it, among others.

· Transportation: given the enormous sales forecast on this date, it is necessary to take into account the company's logistics and transport capabilities. If, as we mentioned before, the increase in sales is greater than 35% compared to other days, we must weigh what the transport needs will be in order to operate successfully. To reach the total of the operation, you must Increase transport of the same exponentially: increasing one third of available transport, at least 10% if sales exceed 35%.

· Logistic staff: in the same way as with transport, it will be necessary increase specialized logistics staff to be able to carry out the day in a satisfactory manner. Taking into account that the increase in sales will be 35%, the available logistics staff must increase by the same number or, at least 10% less. Therefore, the workforce should increase by 25%-35% for that day.

But there are 10 days left, am I still on time?

Of course! One of our greatest achievements at SmartMonkey is, precisely, having launched it to the market the most user-friendly last-mile management tool on the market. In fact, a recent case is that of the Portuguese company Prio, a company that has been able to start optimizing production routes with literally 1 meeting and a 20-minute demonstration.

Don't be less, and do like Prio. Try Planner and start enjoying all the benefits.

Create a schedule in a few minutes with this step-by-step

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Do you want to know more about Black Friday and what are the forecasts for the 2021 edition? Go to our article Black Friday: 50 days until the biggest logistics challenge of the year and find out.

On November 26th, that is, in exactly 50 days, a new edition of Black Friday will be held. A commercial event of American origin that has managed to establish itself with great force around the world in recent years.

Even with the Covid-19 pandemic very present and its inevitable commercial consequences, especially the disproportionate rise in sea freight prices (with a notable impact on trade between China and Europe), the traditional Black Friday will go ahead, despite the “metamorphosis” of the situation.

In this article, we offer you the keys and key aspects of the last edition of the most commercial Black Friday so that you can learn first-hand about the expectations and forecasts of D-Day logistics.

Collapse and rise in prices in maritime freight: How does it affect Black Friday 2021?

Over the past year and a half, electronic commerce has been faced squarely with different problems affecting its good development. One of the first setbacks for the ecommerce it has undoubtedly been a consequence of Covid-19: during the lockdown, many online stores were unable to meet the huge demand, thus causing various logistical problems and even the collapse. In addition, the now popular stranding of the Evergreen vessel and the consequent blockage of the Suez Canal, whose consequences were serious delays for many companies worldwide.

In the same way, in recent weeks, the well-known container crisis has spread, whose impact has shaken the world economy in addition to causing the closure of some ports, such as China. For the Asian country, the closure of a terminal of what is currently the largest port in terms of container traffic on a global scale has caused delays, difficulties as well as an uncertain future for all ecommerce, especially for the next edition of Black Friday 2021 and the Christmas season, the two periods with the highest number of sales in the entire year.

It should be emphasized that all of these problems in the logistics network have consequences not only in terms of delivery times, but also in terms of the final price for users (with a longer transport time, the higher the cost of transport).

And what's the alternative? Companies such as Alibaba have found air transport as a temporary alternative to be able to maintain their logistics operations, an interim solution that has allowed them to maintain the delivery times of their customers in the European market.

Forecasts for Black Friday 2021

Thanks to the article Black Friday 2021 statistics: 10 numbers you should know with the help of the company Oberlo, we offer you below a summary of some of the most significant statistics for the logistics sector ahead of the next edition of Black Friday.

Sales forecasts

Many users choose Black Friday as a special date to advance Christmas shopping with great discounts given the proximity between the two dates.

In fact, in the 2020 edition of Black Friday, sales were so high that they even represented 30% of annual revenue.

Despite not yet having forecasts for the Black Friday 2021 edition, from companies such as In Markerter estimate that in the United States alone, the increase in online sales by that date will be approximately 11.3%.

A third of Spanish adults plan to shop on Black Friday 2021

For this next edition of Black Friday, approximately 13 million Spaniards are expected to shop on the famous “Black Friday”. Of all of them, it is estimated that 78.41% will make their purchases in person while 21.59% will make them through e-commerce. With regard to age groups, it is estimated that it is precisely the generation that expects to spend the most throughout the day.

Average spending on Black Friday 2021

According to the company Deloitte, the average expenditure among Spaniards will be 127 euros during the Black Friday weekend, also including the well-known Cyber Monday. Thus, this average expenditure per person would mean that Spaniards will already spend 23% of the budget reserved for Christmas on Black Friday.

It should be noted that in other countries, such as Mexico, the average expenditure per citizen is 279 American dollars, a significantly higher outlay.

The best-selling products

The products most acclaimed by users for Black Friday are, first of all, technological products, with a total of 39.2% of total sales. Secondly, another big star of this important date are fashion products and accessories, with a total of 33.74% of sales. And finally, leisure and entertainment plans, which win the bronze medal in terms of sales, since they account for around 7.55% of the total.

Do you want Black Friday to be a success for your company? We have the solution! Visit our article Ecommerce: 5 essential tools to survive in 2021 to learn about the most interesting applications for your company.

Logistics trends in ecommerce

It is well known that parcel delivery companies have a lot of difficulty offering a good service during these dates. Neither infrastructures nor personnel are adapted to such a sharp increase in operations. For this and other reasons, a trend is starting to appear in large e-commerce. The internalization of delivery processes in areas with the highest order density.

Currently, only companies with a large number of warehouses (stores) and requirements such as the cold are betting on this change, such as Mercadona, which already distribute their own fleet of gas-powered vehicles. We will see this trend in big brands that are increasingly considering e-commerce. The objectives are clear, better services, lower costs, but also to achieve visibility in the offline world by being able to conspicuously label your vehicles that are constantly moving around the cities.

In these cases, we are looking at route planning tools such as Planner, are very useful for simulating different scenarios and finding optimal logistics performance and determining the return on investment in this type of project. Stay tuned, in future articles we will go into the details of this type of analysis.

Sant Jordi is always a special day, books, roses, queues and people, lots of people. Everyone is out on the street, enjoying a magical day for both children and adults. It is the day of the year when the most books are sold, 7.5% of annual sales In the city of Barcelona.

This year will be special. We'll have to spend it at home, enjoying a good read, our recommendation for these days The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. This year we will save ourselves the hassle of Las Ramblas and we will have to buy the roses online. Without a doubt, a special year.

We want to take advantage of this important date to see the success of initiatives that, in a normal year, would hardly have achieved such overwhelming success.

One of our customers Santjordiacasa.com is using Highway as a tool to optimize the distribution of roses on such a special date as Sant Jordi.

Thanks to the power of the Highway route planner, they have been able to grow in deliveries and reach customers that would have been impossible for them before.

Like them, hundreds of other customers are entering a world such as home delivery. A channel that had often been completely forgotten. Thanks, or unfortunately, COVID-19 has forced the launch of new marketing channels such as Ecommerce and its own distribution and home delivery.

We are seeing this in our traditional customers, distribution companies to the HORECA channel that are converting to home distributors overnight.

Pastry shops such as Cropics they were able to deliver all the Easter monkeys in record time and have the detail of leaving a monkey at my wife's grandmother's house 😁. These types of details make being able to help small businesses make you proud of the work you do and of seeing how you can help more people around you.

We are in a very difficult time for many companies and families. There is little help to get through this crisis and reaching those people we can help is always a challenge. I encourage you to share our story, the story of our users and customers, companies that are embarking on a new adventure, delivery. Without experience, without processes, but with a desire to fight and face the corona, you are not alone.

We won this together.

The distribution on demand is an industry that is growing at a very high speed. New companies appear every day, especially in the market for food, beverages and deliveries of perishable products. And the competition is wild. Efficiency is a key metric in the “I want it all and I want it now” era and the most critical part is what happens from when a new order is placed until it is delivered.

Today I want to focus on the problem of sending new orders, that is, how to decide which courier service the order should be assigned to when an order enters the system. This is because the dispatch today is not addressed systematically. Optimizing the dispatch system can minimize delivery time and improve customer satisfaction.

The operating paradigm of companies that deliver on demand can be divided into two different types:

1. Operations based on a single warehouse are those operations focused on a single tank. This warehouse has several dealers and the programming is done once to obtain an order list; usually grouping orders by area. Amazon Prime is a good example of this paradigm.
2. Operations based on multiple warehouses are those operations that rely on choosing the order in one of the multiple warehouses and delivering it to a customer. In this case, the delivery people are scattered around the city, and once a new order arrives, it is assigned through a shipping process to one of the multiple delivery people. Companies such as Uber, Just Eat, Delivero, etc. operate this way.

The problem of dispatching is solved more or less satisfactorily in the first scenario thanks to the possibility of linking together a list of deliveries and considering it as a Traveling Seller Problem (Traveling Salesman Problem) with some pre-clustering restrictions (OK, I know that TSP is an expensive problem, but... come on, it's about Amazon).

On the contrary, in the second scenario, it is not so clear that the problem is being optimally addressed. How can a new incoming order be added to a running scenario? There are tons of variables to consider:

• Can the courier make multiple collections before starting to deliver?
• Can an already assigned order be reassigned to another courier service?
• Do all orders have the same priority? (for example, all orders must be delivered no later than 30 minutes after placing them)
  Do orders need to be delivered by a particular vehicle?
• ...

Modeling this scenario can be quite challenging, and that's why SmartMonkey has been working on this problem for a while. We call our solution Online Programming Optimization Model (OSOM) (Yes, branding isn't one of our strengths 😅, but phonetically it sounds like “incredible” and that's pretty fun). OSOM can model business restrictions and find a feasible solution to the dispatching problem.

In the simulation below, we have modeled a world where:

• A courier service can be assigned multiple pickups and deliveries at the same time
• and the first next service of each messaging service is fixed and cannot be reassigned in subsequent iterations.

The visualization contains twenty iterations of the world divided into two steps:

1. New incoming services are marked in gray.

2. Services are dynamically assigned to deliverers to optimize overall delivery time.