Efficient E-Commerce Liquidation Solution

Ramadan is about to start - one of the biggest shopping seasons in Pakistan’s retail. Retailers plan to capitalize on this season to generate max sales. But due to COVID-19, the government has again imposed a ban on shops to be opened for a short period of time during the day.

Many brands have opted for a discount strategy to pull the traffic on their websites especially Gul Ahmed. The brand is offering Clearance sales since COVID-19 first hit Pakistan and it's still going strong. It’s a good strategy to liquidate the stock but at the same time, it hurts the brand's image as well.

Our digital & e-commerce specialist team at Shopistan.pk approached this use-case differently and tried to develop a solution in which we are liquidating the stock without having too many discount/promotion campaigns.

Let's look at an example of similar fashion brands like Gul Ahmed and Khaadi. The brand is fashion retail which offers clothing & accessories for women & men. They had the same problem, wanted to flush their stock to generate cash-flow but without affecting the brand.

First, we sorted inventory into the following group. (how to make such product sets)- Women full price items- Women discounted items- Men full price items- Men discounted item- Women discounted clothing- Men discounted clothing

Using Facebook’s catalog sale product we ran the campaign based on the above-segmented inventory and got some awesome results.

Problem was to flush old discounted summer stock. The usual solution to this sort of problem is to offer huge sale campaigns. We didn’t want to opt for that since, in the long run, it hurts the brand’s image and also we consider ourselves as technology experts and wanted to come up with a more creative and technical solution.

Fashion e-commerce has seen a huge growth in the last couple of years. Fast-moving fashion is now considered the same as perishable goods with a very limited shelf life.

If a user goes to a website and views a product but doesn’t complete the purchase then it's a missed opportunity and we should re-target the user with a window of 7-day window to make a purchase out of him.

We decided on using up-sell logic through the Facebook catalog ads. We wanted to somehow show customers fresh stock inventory (in which he showed interest) for 7 days and if during that period, if he didn’t interact with that ad, we wanted to show him similar products but at discount.

It was easier said than done. Since Facebook doesn’t allow such complex targeting in its built-in up-sell product, we decided to use custom rules. That was the hardest part. We came up with various combinations but nothing worked. Even had a detailed session with our Facebook account manager but couldn’t come up with a reliable solution.

Finally, after a lot of internal brainstorming, we came up with a combination of custom rules that actually worked

Using this strategy our clients are able to liquidate their stock even on mark-down price but without announcing a sale campaign to maintain the brand image.