Zulily, owned by Qurate Retail Group, is heads down in preparing for the holidays. The flash-sale site this week rolled out a new price-comparison tool on Zulily.com and its mobile app to get an early start.
“We’re going to ramp up our holiday shopping experience through increased selection and better deals early,” says John Lohnas, chief merchant at Zulily. “We think it’s going to be a healthy holiday season for us.” It also plans to have more products from “national” brands by the end of the year, but Lohnas declined to reveal more.
The merchant aims to ramp holiday sales up in early November because there are fewer holiday shopping days from Cyber Monday to Christmas this year due to how late Thanksgiving is. “We want to connect with the shopper earlier in the shopping season,” he says.
Zulily launches 100 curated, personalized sales from many brands—both unique to Zulily and other well-known brands, such as Fanatics, Gucci and Melissa and Doug—daily. These flash sales run for 72 hours.
To better serve its deal-seeking shoppers, Zulily is testing its price-comparison feature. On its product detail pages, shoppers will see a badge that displays a “Best Price Promise.” If the same product can be found on Amazon.com or Walmart.com, its price on those retailers’ sites will be displayed next to Zulily’s price.
“There’s a misconception of who really has the best price on products,” Lohnas says. When the retailer looked at its data, it found that 97% of the time, its prices matched those or were lower than those on Amazon and Walmart, he says. However, if a shopper finds the same item for a lower price on Amazon or Walmart, Zulily will match the competitors’ price.
“We want to be transparent with customers and often, there’s a misconception of who are the leaders of lower-priced products,” he says.
The feature is available to all U.S. shoppers on Zulily.com and on its mobile app from Oct. 2-Dec. 19. It was important for it to be available on the app at launch because Zulily is a “mobile-first business,” according to Lohnas. 74% of its total traffic and business occurs on the mobile app, he says.
The price feature is in a pilot phase and may be extended beyond Dec. 19. “We will continue to listen to customers, track results and will react from there. We’re committing through that date, but will continue to evolve,” Lohnas says.
Qurate is No. 9 in the Internet Retailer 2019 Top 1000. Amazon.com Inc. is No. 1. Walmart Inc. is No. 3.
Favorite