Peak trading, the golden opportunity for retailers to make the most of heightened consumer spending and increased sales, is just around the corner. From Grey Thursday through to Christmas and beyond, brands will fiercely compete for shoppers’ attention.

Retailers must meticulously prepare to reap all of the benefits, taking into account trends, challenges and strategies. So how can you prepare for peak this time round?

Omnichannel capabilities for the win

Crownpeak’s Peak Trading Report 2022, compiled data from more than 300 retailers, shows the return of in-store footfall, highlighting a preference for omnichannel shopping. However, shoppers’ love affair for online still remains strong. With more options to make the most of the offers, consumers are expecting a seamless experience across channels alongside personalization at every touchpoint.

If brands are to rise to the challenge of rapid, high-volume shopping over the peak season – across multiple devices and channels – buyer journeys must be more efficient, optimized and personalized than ever before.

Make product discovery fun

Effective personalisation creates fun, fluid journeys that, in turn, foster deep brand-buyer connections and boost loyalty.

So how can e-commerce brands maintain those deep connections during peak season when shoppers don’t always know what gifts they want to buy? The answer is enhanced product discovery.

Crownpeak’s product discovery features begin in the search bar, putting natural language processing (NLP) to work to autocomplete search queries and serve up a selection of relevant related brands, accessories and cross-sale items.

French brand, Nature & Découvertes, has put the technology to impressive use, guiding visitors to select from its +30K inventory of eco-friendly gifts by asking questions about the recipient and budget. Nature & Découvertes’ Gift Engine accounts for 9% of the site’s turnover.

Personalize and future-proof with data

Every data point makes the personalization process more authentic and effective. The spike in visits over the peak period is an unequalled opportunity to collate, refine and leverage data to improve future journeys.

But brands shouldn’t make the mistake of making data collection all about who visits their store—the key to effective personalization is more often about knowing why.

Crownpeak’s NLP-powered search can play a key role here by ‘understanding’ the intent behind non-standard, idiosyncratic and slang search terms and providing relevant results.

The platform also collects and analyzes data about how the visitor reached the site, their viewed items and browsing patterns to draw intelligent conclusions about intent to power seamless omnichannel personalization across future interactions.

In addition, Crownpeak’s AI uses machine learning to process vast multi-user datasets to identify emerging trends, spot new customer segments and inform strategy going forward.

Stay online

Even the most well-thought-out personalization strategies will count for little over BFCM 2023 if online stores can’t remain online and responsive.

Last year, the 300 clients surveyed in our Peak Trading Report experienced an eye-watering 2.86bn requests served over the five-day BFCM trading period alone, with 6,530 queries registered every second at the height of requests.

Crownpeak delivered a 100% uninterrupted uptime over peak trading, to ensure every customer didn’t miss a second of trading.