Is Your Store Business Prepared for the Chinese New Year?


As the Chinese New Year nears eCommerce store owners tend to get their stores curated or create special campaigns for their visitors. This includes integrating a Chinese New Year theme, offering discounts, free shipping and many other tricks to entice visitors from over the web.

Chinese new year in a time for the Chinese to come together, decorate, visit loved ones, and celebrate in unison. Being the biggest celebration on the Chinese calendar means it’s a time when everything sells. But, this doesn’t mean traffic will just land on your eCommerce store automatically, you have to work for it.

In today’s article we take a look at two aspects of the Chinese New Year campaign of 2018. One informing customers about the holiday sale, and, two communicate with customers using brilliant email & push notification templates.

What Usually Happens to eCommerce Stores on Chinese New Year

Generally, Chinese New Year is a very busy time with loads of traffic, multiple orders, returns, angry customers, payment issues, delayed orders, and the works. Those with experience with the event will agree it may be profitable but needs proper patience & hard work.

What’s can Dropshippers do on Chinese New Year

For all my readers operating their own dropshipping eStores, this is a really good time to cash in on selling your entire catalog. There are two ways to go about this, either carry on with your store as it is or dwell into Print on Demand products for Chinese New Year. We will primarily talk about dropshipping through AliExpress and eave out print on demand for now.

Carry on Dropshipping

If you wish to carry on dropshipping manufactured products from AliExpress (or other sources), there is much to think about. eStore owners must address three very crucial aspects of managing campaigns for Chinese New Year. These include:

Informing customers & audiences

The first step to take is get your eStore ready and start informing your existing customers and subscribers about the Chinese New Year sale, its details, and possible delays.

The easiest trick is by placing a bar or widget with a Chinese New Year’s Sale message. Welcome your visitors and wish them a Happy New Year. Since this year is attributed as the year of the Dog, having animated elements in your messages will be an excellent idea. You can also include a message to inform visitors about impending order delays, and late shipping times.

Next, prepare a proper push notification message to inform customers about the Chinese New year promotion. You can also land visitors on a dedicated page to let them know about any order delays, payment delays, and damaged products. This landing page will act as a single space to address any inconveniences during the sale.

Drafting an email for the sale is an absolutely brilliant idea, since email is a preferred medium for both marketers and customers alike. Apart from informing customers & visitors about the Chinese New Year sale, the email should apologize for any inconvenience’s the customer may face during the promo campaign.

Preparing for Queries, Returns & Refunds

Keep in mind that the holiday is on the 16th of February, and many of your AliExpress suppliers will go on holiday too. Orders will be overloaded for suppliers and dropshipping eStores will be the most to suffer.

Preparing for issues, refunds and returns is going to be very crucial for a successful campaign. While the process can be easily managed with the help of leading edge Shopify apps, you should be more committed towards communicating with the customer.

Prompt response in case of disgruntled customers who are angry than your usual customer is highly recommended. You will have a lot of these “angry customers”, and they will be hard to handle. Consider sending out a pre-shipping apology, for example observe this template:

Please note that we are processing a huge number orders and you might experience up to 2 to 3 weeks processing delay.

To Apologize for this inconvenience, we are delighted to compensate you with a “(% or fixed amount) discount or free shipping” on your total purchase. At any time feel free to utilize the discount by simply using the code CNYDISCOUNT.

We thank you for your understanding and patience. Please contact us on our live chat/WhatsApp/Email/Phone with all your queries, and we’ll do our best to sort them out for you. In the meantime have a look at all the amazing new additions to the store catalog too … Happy Chinese New Year!”

Remember that people absolutely get delighted when they save upto $5 on their purchase. Now, be clever this requires you price your products ideally to delight the buyer later in case any discrepancies occur.

Prepare content templates for instant communication

A great aspect to prepare when events like Chinese New Year come up. You should have email templates ready for:

  • Cancellations & Refunds
  • Late Shipping & Order Processing

You can combine these templates will a cutting edge email app like Mail Chimp and send out to all customers who made purchases during the Chinese New Year event. This will allow your buyer to be at ease and patient, instead of being on your customer support channels every day.

See You Again Soon

I hope my examples will help you create the perfect templates to reach out to your customers during the Chinese New Year event. For more template ideas and suggestions come join us at our exclusive community of entrepreneurs on Facebook.

If you liked the article and it helped you out, remember to share on social channels. For more amazing guides and reading sign up to our newsletter from the home page now. Do remember to leave your feedback and queries so we can get you going on your entrepreneurial journey.

Ameer Rizvi

Ameer Rizvi is a professional blogger and previously worked with lifestyle, information security & entertainment services. Ameer now exercises his digital marketing & authoring skills assisting entrepreneurs and prospect wantrepreneurs reach their million dollar goals. A loyal Liverpool FC fan, EDM fanatic, geo-politics observer, and history geek; Ameer spends hours discovering strategies, hacks and tricks to contribute towards the eCommerce community.

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