Overstock.com Shows It’s Never Too Late to Create a Customer Day Event

Just because Amazon has conceivably stolen the spotlight with its massive anniversary sale event, known to the world as Prime Day, there’s no reason other retailers—both physical and ecommerce—can’t still enjoy some success of their own with similar events. Overstock.com proved as much when it ran its first-ever Customer Day sales event on October 15th.

Held in conjunction with the online retailer’s annual Anniversary Sale, which runs over the course of a few weeks each October, Overstock.com’s Customer Day event featured more than 1.5 million products that were discounted—a record for the retailer. Products ranged across a large number of categories, including bedding, area rugs, home décor, some of the company’s private-label brands. The result of the day, according to an Overstock.com press release, was the company’s strongest non-holiday sales even in their 19-year history. They reported 100 percent growth in furniture sold, 80 percent growth in area rugs sold, nearly 80 percent growth in mattresses sold, and a 20 percent growth in average basket size.

Additionally, Overstock realized 68 percent growth in revenue on the day, 200 percent growth in Club O membership signups, and 42 percent growth in new customers who made purchases on the site.

“We wanted to do something big for our customers, and the result was the largest single-day home sales event we have ever held,” JP Knab, Chief Marketing Officer for Overstock.com, said in the statement. “Customer Day wasn’t just a big day of discounts, it was one of the biggest home-shopping events of the year, and we’re proud to be the brand bringing millions of dollars of savings to our customers.”

Importantly, Knab acknowledged that the success of the day has convinced the company that this is something they’ll continue to do each year moving forward.

Just Do It

The idea to do a one-day sale for loyalty program members or your top customers is incredibly unoriginal at this point, but that hasn’t prevented companies from launching them and realizing some tremendous outcomes because of them.

Retailers have learned, in year three, that they can very easily piggyback off of the attention that Amazon’s Prime Day draws to the ecommerce space, but that doesn’t mean that that has to be the only one-day sale that retailer’s target. For starters, that’s Amazon’s anniversary day. The odds are pretty good that your store’s founding date doesn’t fall during the middle of July. So, use that as an opportunity to drive traffic to your store or your website.

I’m not spilling any top-secret retail information here, but events like Prime Day work so well because they create a sense of urgency for the customer. They want to take advantage of those sales before they disappear. And, even if they end up not making a purchase on the day, events like an anniversary sale—if marketed correctly—do a tremendous job of driving awareness for your brand and the products that are involved in the sale. That’s a win for you and your vendors.

And speaking of your vendors, they can be an enormous asset to you in helping you drive the success of that one-day event. If you coordinate yourselves well enough in advance, you can have those brands involved help promote the sale, maybe even come into your store for the day if you go the brick-and-mortar route with this, and hold special mini-events throughout the day, spotlighting each of their products, holding training sessions, or something similar.

This is all me just spitballing some ideas, but the fact remains: You can create your own Prime Day. Use it as a tool to drive not just sales, but brand awareness, and loyalty program signups if that’s something you offer in your store. You can never have too many “holidays” on the calendar, so use your store’s birthday as just another reason to celebrate your customers while also celebrating yourselves.