🤖 Introducing GPTs & Black Friday Q&A

📰 E-comm Industry News

• ASOS sales continue to fall. The brand has announced that it will invest £30 million to focus on brand building, while strategically moving its focus back to fashion. They don’t expect to return to profit until at least 2025. More on this soon.

• According to sources, Amazon has dedicated a team to train an ambitious AI model codenamed ‘Olympus‘ to take on ChatGPT and Google.

• Shopify expands Shop Marketplace to the web and it looks a lot like Amazon, despite saying it doesn’t want to be a competitor to the retail giant.

• John Lewis launched their Black Friday promotions earlier this year to cater to shoppers buying earlier than usual.

• Retail giant Zalando expects its revenue to be 0.5% to 3% lower this year compared to 2022.

• Shopify enhances gift card options for stores. Staff members can now create gift cards in admin to send to a buyer. Customers can also add their own recipient and personalised message to gift cards, too.

🛍️ Your Black Friday Questions Answered

Black Friday is now a huge worldwide phenomenon. But here’s some food for thought.

According to data from Tidio, 62% of shoppers think Black Friday is simply a ploy to get them to spend more… yet 80% admit to planning to shop during the event.

To keep things simple, we’ve separated the questions to those that are from sellers and those from consumers. We also have some stellar stats thrown in too. Happy shopping!

Retailer Questions:

When should I start my Back Friday sale?

Consumer trends are showing that customers are doing their Christmas shopping earlier than usual, and unfortunately, are predicted to spend less this year. Because of this, start your sales sooner than usual.

How do I promote my Black Friday Sale?

Social media, on your website, and through email marketing. This three-pronged approach will give you the best results!

What types of discounts work best?

It depends on your business, but traditionally percentage discounts followed by bundles are the most sought-after discounts.

How do I optimise my Black Friday email campaign?

Segmentation is key. We’ve seen some stores put extra effort into customers who made a purchase last Black Friday, which is smart as they will likely do so again. Craft compelling subject lines and use good CTAs.

I’m nervous about product returns over Black Friday

So this is always a risk. Just be sure you have a clear and defined returns process laid out. Great customer support always makes a difference too in the customer’s eyes.

Consumer Questions:

Are Black Friday sales worth it? Or are they just marketing hype?

This is the killer question. As a marketer, I believe 80% of it is hype… but there are some good deals out there. Do your research and only buy what you need. Don’t fall for the limited-time deals, flash sales, etc. Sellers and marketers want you to feel FOMO and be impulsive. It’s all a sales tactic to make you buy.

How can I find the best deals?

Online publications often release lists of the best deals to be had. But just be sure that the publication isn’t sponsored by the platform selling the product!

Secondly, do your own research, and look at the price of goods you want to purchase across the year. Sometimes stores put the price up before Black Friday just to make the discount look even better!

Are the deals on Black Friday the best?

Every year we see brands starting their sales earlier and earlier. Are the deals on the actual date of Black Friday better than those on other days? Not necessarily. In fact, there are more sales on Cyber Monday compared to Black Friday.

Black Friday Facts:

• According to Shopify data, mobile plays a huge role in Black Friday, with 73% of sales being made on mobile devices in 2022. Up from 71% in 2021.

• Black Friday sales spend is predicted to be £3 billion in the UK, £900 million less than the expected spend of £3.9 billion in 2022.

• Over ¾ of Gen Z are planning to spend in the Black Friday sales this year.

  

  Chart From Finder.com

• According to Google Trends, the peak of worldwide search interest for Black Friday was in 2019.

  

  Google Trends worldwide search data for Black Friday.

The Outpost’s Opinion: We currently find ourselves in a rather peculiar situation when it comes to Black Friday. Sellers and marketers are fervently urging shoppers to fully embrace the enticing sales. However, let's face the truth: the soaring cost of living has taken a toll on consumers' wallets.

We’ll present an extensive overview of Black Friday expenditure after this year’s event concludes to see how things played out.

🤖 GPTs & the GPT Store - What We Know

ChatGPT passed the 100 million active users mark earlier this year. That was a big milestone, but it’s nothing compared to what the future likely holds for the humble AI bot.

In last week’s edition of Hustlers Outpost, we brought you the news that OpenAI is allowing users to create their own custom version of ChatGPT, called GPTs. We had hoped they’d be a bit more creative on the name…

The good news is, that these user-created GPTs can be shared publicly, with the GPT store coming later THIS month! (Woo!)

The bad news is you have to have a GPT-4 Plus account (costing $20/month) to browse, create and use these GPTs (boo!). If you have a Plus account, this is where you can access and create GPTs.

No doubt at some point in the future, these features will get rolled out to free users too. But it’s still early days.

This news has already been immensely popular for OpenAI and its users. In fact, they’ve seen such a massive surge in the already popular ‘ChatGPT Plus‘ paid accounts, that yesterday Sam Altman announced that they’ve literally had to stop taking people’s money.

The GPT store will also include GPT creations from verified chatbot builders. So we can expect some incredible bots on the platform, as well as some hilarious ones.

These are some of our favorite GPTs so far from OpenAI.

• Laundry Buddy: An AI bot that you can ask anything about stains, washing cycles, fabrics, and everything laundry. Random, but we like it!

• Tech Support Advisor: Instead of asking a moody teenager for support with your technology dilemmas, this AI bot helps you effectively troubleshoot pretty much any device.

• Sticker Whiz: Takes your wildest ideas and turns them into actual stickers, which are shipped to your door. We’re all over this!

• The Negotiator: Become a better negotiator. Be trained to get better outcomes by, you guessed it, an AI bot.

OpenAI has gone a step further too, by announcing that businesses can create their own internal chatbots… and it’s a really smart addition.

These internal AI bots can be trained on company policy, processes, and actions. It’s almost like having a new employee in the business. There’s a lot of talk about how AI will impact the workforce, this really is a direct catalyst for that change.

The Outpost’s Opinion: This will blow up. It’s another big step forward in the AI race for OpenAI. They are further differentiating themselves as the key player here, and it’s not often you see the likes of Google playing catch up.

We can hardly wait to see how the GPT store unfolds… maybe we’ll even make our own GPT 🧐 We’ll give an update when their paid subscriptions to GPT Plus are back on!