If you are asking today if your business is ready for a Black Friday Rush, it may already be a bit late to change your preparations for this year – but it’s still good to take a look.  Online businesses and brick and mortar businesses have a lot in common, they both are trying to capture that surge of traffic around the busiest shopping season of the year.

Black Friday got to this place of massive discounts and big glitzy promotions over the last 25+ years due to the basic supply and demand equation.   Since the early 1980’s the amount of brick and mortar retail floor space across the United States has increased on average 4% year over year, yet the population has only increased roughly 1% each year.  In short, there are more stores and items to shop than 25+ years ago on a per person basis (more supply and less demand).

 

According to Gallup, consumers estimate they will spend just $704 this holiday shopping season, on average. This is down from 2012, when the average consumer said they would spend $770.  All this is leading to more businesses competing for customer attention by using glitz, glamor and of course massive discount promotions to lure you in.  Black Friday is the big event of the year for many of these retailers – online, and brick, and mortar alike.

 

Online businesses are of course more recent to the ball game than the brick and mortar retail stores – but similarly compete for the attention of online buyers, and often have similar showcased promotions this time of year. Similar to brick and mortar retail stores, the online businesses have to fight that same supply and demand concept to get as many potential clients eye-balling their products and services versus their competitors – and its common to see deep discounts, promotions and low pricing to lure your attention.

Planned promotional strategy is the official term in business speak, but the reality for healthy well run businesses is wisely used discounting to bring new and existing clients to the store or web site.  It could be that $100 TV door-buster to get you in the store which in turn leads you to spend extra money on accessories and other high profit products (say special audio visual cables that have massive mark ups that help balance out the profit of selling that $100 TV door-buster).  Buy 1 get 1 free, 75% off black Friday discounts, super-sized upgrades, etc are all part of a well run business utilizing discounts to grab market attention.

Retail stores run into problems during the big rush for black Friday because literally there are more people than their stores can handle waiting at the doors, too busy a show-room floor for people to browse, and too few discount items (say that $100 TV at the door) to go to everyone who wants one – which can lead to customer dis-satisfaction and even hinder the overall goal which is for the business to make a profit by having the client browse all those high-mark up accessories next to the discounted items.

 

It’s crucial any business be ready for the potential rush.  Online businesses are no different, and online businesses have the extra ability to handle larger sudden volumes of transactions as long as their ecommerce system, web site and back end servers can handle the traffic spike during the busy season.  The last thing you want to do is be selling buy 1 get 1 free offers, and have your web site so slow that the consumer won’t stay in the shopping cart check out process to browse the profitable add-on items you are using to make up the profit margin.  It’s essential to plan ahead, have a fast and reliable web site, good back end cloud-based servers that can scale on demand and provide reliability when you need it most.  You don’t want to be caught with all your clients trapped outside the store with no way for them to get in and shop when it counts most, online or in-person at your retail location.

So if you are an online store, brick and mortar, or selling via online auction sites – plan ahead and be prepared for the Black Friday Rush.

 

 

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      TurnKey Internet, Inc Launches Black Friday Deals for The Cloud

 

 

LATHAM, NEW YORK (November 19, 2013) – Sustainable IT solutions provider TurnKey Internet, Inc. announced today the launch of their Black Friday Deals offering some of the best black Friday web hosting and cloud services deals for 2013.

TurnKey Internet is known for running it’s eagerly-awaited, industry-leading Black Friday specials, and this year is no different. TurnKey Internet is offering 75% off for life of nearly every product they offer – dedicated servers, virtual private servers, cloud servers, web hosting, colocation services, SEO hosting, reseller hosting, and much more. More information can be found at http://www.turnkeyinternet.net/blackfriday.

“Last year’s special was an epic success, and we couldn’t wait for our 2013 Black Friday promotion to kick off” remarked Adam Wills, CEO of TurnKey Internet. “We have been receiving phone calls and inquires for over a month asking about our Black Friday promotions, and I am happy we are offering deals like these to our clients; we want them feeling like shopping TurnKey’s Black Friday Special was well worth their time and effort– two commodities we find positively invaluable.”

Founded in 1999, TurnKey Internet, Inc. is a full-service green data center and leading provider of sustainable web hosting and IT solutions that received the EPA’s Energy Star Datacenter certification in 2013. From its SSAE 16 Type 2 certified facility in Latham, NY—New York’s Tech Valley Region—TurnKey offers web hosting, communication services, web-based IT systems, software as a service (SaaS), enterprise colocation services, and computing as a service to clients in more than 150 countries. For more information, please call (518) 618-0999 or visit www.turnkeyinternet.net/media.

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Howdie do Turnkey Lovers,

How long has it been? 4, 5 years? Probably only a few months, but with all the exciting things happening at Turnkey lately, it’s been easy to lose track of time. Well, I’m back with a special treat. One of my co-workers asked me to help write a post comparing VPS’s(Virtual Private Servers) to dedicated servers and finally to colocation. Well, I have to admit, it sounded a bit boring to me. I didn’t want to just write one long article comparing those 3 very different items. I wanted to write something different, but didn’t have many ideas on where to go with this. What are VPS’s, dedicated servers and colocation services?

Enter stage left, the Marketing Room.

I went and spoke with someone you’re probably very familiar with, Dylan Youngs. Top 5 best marketing coordinators: Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, and Dylan (I’ve always enjoyed saying that since I’ve met him).

Dylan and I get to talking and begin throwing some ideas around. We came up with an idea to compare some of our services to a common experience that most people can relate to. The process of living with your parents to getting your own house. I came up with this analogy on this:

Shared hosting is to living with your parents as VPS’ are to getting your own apartment.

That may sound a bit confusing, but stick with me.

When you’re a child living with your parents, they provide for you. They place a roof over your head, food on your table and hopefully a nice bed to rest your head. How does that relate to shared hosting and VPS’s?

Well, let’s say you wake up one day and decide that you want to have a website. Maybe you have a business and want to reach out further to potential customers or maybe you just want to display some art that you’ve been working on to the world. Whatever reasons you may want a website you will need a place to “house” it. Host the site if you will.

We provide you with a website building tool to help get your website created. We also provide you with different tools to get your site listed on the greater internet. Providing you a “house” and “food” for your website to perform properly.

Next thing you know, your art goes viral and everyone wants to see your site. Some people even want to buy a piece of your art. You reach out to a developer and using the tools provided through Turnkey, they create you a database to allow you to begin to sell your art online.

Your new site is in full swing with new people seeming to view your site every day. New inquires for your art are flooding into your email inbox, but something happens. Customers are beginning to complain about the slowness of your site. Some saying that it takes 15 seconds plus to load the site.

What do you do?

You reach out to us! TurnKey Internet (parents in this extended metaphor) and they make some tweaks for you.

We inform you that your site has “grown up” a bit and no longer is eating baby food, but now is ready for full on adult food! Your bandwidth is increased and you’re given more disk space, however, you only see a small increase in the performance of your site.

Your developer informs you that you should install some additional modules to help speed up the site, but when you attempt to install them, you discover that you need greater access to install these features. Your host informs you that the modules you’re requesting would affect everyone else on the server and as “parents” of the server, they won’t install the custom software to ensure a stable environment for the rest of the customers.

Or in laymen terms, your “parents” say you will play by their rules while living under their roof.

It’s at this point that your site has matured and grown to a point that it’s time to move to its own environment.

It’s time to get your own “apartment” so that you can run and install items for your site to perform better. It’s time to get your own place and that’s when you discover that TurnKey sells these items called VPS’s (Virtual Private Servers). From a bit of research, you learn that on the VPS, you can have your way. You can install custom applications. Tweak the settings and just have greater control, however, the best part is that you will have your own “apartment” which means no more sharing resources with other customers. With that, you send a sales inquiry to Turnkey Internet to gather more information.

And there it is. Come back next week to learn more about becoming an adult in the hosting world!

Have any more questions? Email us at sales@turnkeyinternet.net

 

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