Despite online shopping event Click Frenzy being described by some retailers as a failure, the 24-hour shopping frenzy is making a comeback this year with a series of sales.
Click Frenzy co-founder Grant Arnott has confirmed Click Frenzy is returning in 2013 with a pre-Mother’s Day sale on April 23, End of Financial Year sale, and a Father’s Day sale along with the same 24-hour mega-sale in November.
The first Click Frenzy sale in November last year came in for criticism after the site crashed during the sale period.
“Due to the outage and the subsequent controversy via social media, there’s a perception that Click Frenzy failed,” Arnott said in a statement to Power Retail.
“However, the results experienced by the majority of participating retailers, and the positive growth we have seen in our subscriber database since the event, suggests otherwise.”
Arnott said he has “listened and learnt” from the criticism.
“We have made and continue to make improvements to ensure our future events are even more successful for shoppers and retailers,” he said.
“To help moderate the traffic, subscribers will be given early access to Click Frenzy events whilst for the public, the shopping site goes live at 7pm for the start of each event.”
Kate Morris, the owner of Adore Beauty, participated in last year’s Click Frenzy sale and told SmartCompany this morning she won’t be signing up for the Mother’s Day sale.
“In terms of last year’s sale, it certainly wasn’t ideal in the way it panned out but it demonstrated the demand for online shopping in Australia, which is a good thing,” she says.
“From our perspective, our positioning is as a prestige cosmetics retailer so I don’t want all our promotions to be based around sales and discounts, there are other things consumers want.”
Morris says Adore Beauty is not planning sale activity for events like Mother’s Day and instead will look to add value.
“We may look in the future at participating in a Black Friday type sale if Click Frenzy is to become an aggregator of sale events but you don’t necessarily need a sale for every event in the calendar,” Morris says.
But retail expert and Bentley’s partner David Gordon expects many retailers will sign up again for Click Frenzy.
“In any start-up situation there are going to be mistakes and unforseen circumstances. The success of Click Frenzy will be whether it understands the causes of the issues and how it rectifies them,” he says.
“Because of the low entry cost, which is only about $1,000 and the marketing splash that ClickFrenzy made that even though many suppliers were not completely satisfied, most of them will give it another go because it is a good idea and it can only get better.”
Cara Waters is the editor of SmartCompany. Cara was previously a senior reporter at the Financial Times website FT Adviser in London and has also worked for The Sunday Times.
