Objective For Black Friday, Sport Chek had an ambitious target: beating Amazon at the online retail battle they’ve owned for more than a decade. Quite a challenge since Sport Chek invests nothing close to the billions Amazon invests online.
In the seven days leading up to Black Friday, we detected a new analytic trend: the average number of items left abandoned in Sport Chek’s website carts increased by the hour, reaching unpreceded high. We called this new trend “online window shopping”: placing items temporarily in Sport Chek’s carts, consumers look for similar options on its competitors’ website. Consumers were prepping up for Black Friday, ready to make the best deal as soon as Black Friday began at midnight!
Beat Amazon for Black Friday
The fierce competition between retailers during Black Friday is reaching unprecedented heights. Sport Chek listened to its consumers and leveraged “online window shopping” to win the retail war against Amazon. Products left in Sport Chek’s website shopping carts became a gold mine of insights on what consumers were looking to buy: we used those start products to attract more consumers. New consumers visiting the site generated either e-comm sales…or abandoned items in their carts, providing more real-time data from which we selected more star products. An infinite loop of insights and sales.