Why Christmas begins early for online retailers
There used to be an unspoken rule about the Christmas retail season that any ads would only begin after Bonfire Night was over. After that, the deluge began.
Unusually for today’s society, this particular season is getting longer not shorter, as advertisers and retailers inculcate in consumers the idea that Halloween is now the time when the floodwaters are unleashed.
Christmas now begins on November 1st, Hark the Herald Angels Sing! But for online retailers it comes even earlier because of the seasonal gravity of that time of year.
A bad Christmas in the age of algorithms and customer acquisition extends beyond revenues and margins; it probably spells the end.
Recent research from Ometria bears this out on data it accumulated from comparing last year’s Christmas with the first ten months of this year.