Plan Your Year With DataHawk’s 2022 eCommerce Calendar

To help you grow and maximize your business expenditures, DataHawk put together the ultimate 2022 eCommerce holiday calendar with all the major dates that influence consumers’ purchasing habits so that you do not miss out on any profitable holiday opportunities. This article also identifies five of the most popular trends disrupting the eCommerce industry in 2022 to help you seize market opportunities and adapt to them rather than against them.

Holiday spending has seen highs of over $100 billion online sales in the US alone. DataHawk’s 2022 eCommerce calendar provides you with helpful reminders and tips on how you can increase sales, tap into new markets, and reach new customers with effective paid or organic campaigns.

More than 70 eCommerce trade shows and conferences are taking place worldwide in 2022. By assembling all the different industry nodes and stakeholders, such events promote brand awareness, create collaborative links, and democratize knowledge. Among the many benefits of trade shows and conferences, one, in particular, stands out: their ability to produce qualified leads. To help you sort through the lot and determine which ones are worth attending, DataHawk compiled a list of the 19 of the most noteworthy events and incorporated them into its 2022 eCommerce calendar. Here are a few of them:

The two-day (February 22-23) Savant eCommerce event in Berlin welcomes over 200 eCommerce aficionados and offers 13 hours of content with cross-industry perspectives from innovators in sectors with advantages in retail.

The Prosper Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a 3-day (March 14-16) networking hub and educational conference where established Amazon experts and sellers discuss the latest innovations.

The DataHawk Summit is a two-day virtual conference (April 6-7) for Amazon and Walmart brands, sellers, agencies, and aggregators to network with other top sellers. During the summit, DataHawk experts and industry specialists will share real-life experiences and in-depth demonstrations on growing a brand in eCommerce.

The eCom World Conference is a two-day (May 4-5) online masterclass and networking event that hosts over 30,000 attendees to go over in-depth speeches, panels, workshops, and live Q&A sessions that share knowledge on building, operating, and scaling profitable eCommerce businesses.

The Internet Commerce Summit and Awards event in Mumbai (August 3-4) focuses on digital democracy and explores the seamless integration of digital best practices for the future of eCommerce through four main themes: Services Commerce, Lifestyle Commerce, Marketing & Channels, and Society & Culture.

The start of a new year marks a fresh beginning; the canvas is whipped clean. The month of January is known for making New Year’s resolutions to encourage people to make good and healthy decisions. But how often do people stick to them? To support ambitious behaviors, you can build a marketing campaign around these kinds of resolutions. For example, if your eCommerce business sells health and fitness products, you can offer a 30-day challenge paired with coupons to help those looking to be healthy.

January 2022 Holidays and Sales Campaign Opportunities

• January 15 – National Hat Day
• January 17 – Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• January 20 – Get to Know Your Customers Day
• January 27 – Chocolate Cake Day

February 2022 Holidays and Sales Campaign Opportunities

• February 1 – Chinese New Year (year of the tiger)
• February 9 – National Pizza Day
• February 13 – Super Bowl Sunday
• February 14 – Valentines Day

To commemorate month-long celebrations such as Pride Month, which honors the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan, brands can collaborate with influential figures to launch awareness campaigns. In doing so, they can share inspiring stories with business consumers by amplifying the voices and stories of the LGBTQI community. Take, for example, what Belgian designer Diane von Furstenberg did on March 8, 2020. To commemorate International Women’s Day, von Furstenberg collaborated with Amazon for a groundbreaking initiative called #InCharge. The initiative promoted women-owned businesses and authors selling in Amazon stores. As part of the initiative, von Furstenberg and other notable small business owners, such as Obia Ewah, Sarah Ribner, and Andrea Sreshta, were featured on Amazon’s homepage. Partnerships in this vein have the power to create a significant impact and have the potential to alter the trajectory of an eCommerce business in a blink of an eye.

Back to school season is considered a significant retail holiday. On average, parents in the US spend roughly $700 on back-to-school supplies. By creating a back-to-school marketing campaign, you can simultaneously increase your brand’s awareness, build brand loyalty, and help students get the supplies they need to excel in their journey back to school. For example, you may offer parents and students a back-to-school shopping list that allows them to buy all the items on that list in one purchase as a bundle. There are many benefits to bundling. Product bundling simplifies purchasing decisions, lowers customer costs, enhances customer experience, increases potential sales, raises product exposure, and reduces inventory levels.

July 2022 Holidays and Sales Campaign Opportunities

• July 1 – Canada Day
• July 4 – US Independence Day
• July 6 – UEFA Women’s Euro Championship
• July 7 – World Chocolate Day
• July 17 – World Emoji Day
• July 30 – International Day of Friendship

September 2022 Holidays and Sales Campaign Opportunities

• September 5 – Labor Day
• September 12 – National Video Games Day
• September 17 – Oktoberfest
• September 27 – World Tourism Day

With travel becoming increasingly difficult in a post-pandemic world, you can offer your customers a little piece of your world. For instance, you can launch a campaign that describes your product, its origins, where it is made, and what parts of the world influence the process of bringing that product into existence #ShareYourProductsJourney.

In 2021 retail eCommerce holiday season sales in the US reached close to $207 billion. To ensure you make the most of the Gift-Giving Season, there are a few things you should keep in mind. For one, you can start automating your processes such as inventory, purchasing order approvals, as well as order fulfillment and management. You can also make sure your storefront is fully optimized by using eCommerce calendars to remind you to optimize your product’s organic search performance, analyze your sponsored ads performance, monitor changes in products performance, and gain insights on competitors ahead of time. Another thing you can do to help you increase sales during the holiday season is offer specials and free shipping. According to Forbes, 77 percent of consumers do not buy products online due to unsatisfactory shipping options. However, you do not have to offer free shipping all year long. Instead, you can offer free shipping for holiday orders after spending a designated dollar amount.

October 2022 Holidays and Sales Campaign Opportunities

• October 1 – International Coffee Day
• October 5 – World Teachers Day
• October 10 – World Mental Health Day
• October 16 – Boss’s Day
• October 24 – Diwali
• October 31 – Halloween

December 2022 Holidays and Sales Campaign Opportunities

• December 4 – National Sock Day
• December 12 – Green Monday
• December 14 – National Free Shipping Day
• December 18 – Hanukkah
• December 24 – Christmas Eve
• December 25 – Christmas Day
• December 26 – Kwanzaa
• December 31 – New Years Eve

New Year’s Eve is possibly one of the most celebrated holidays. With an estimated 92 percent of adults celebrating New Year’s Eve in the US, it is no surprise that it is one of the biggest party nights of the year. Whether you plan to organize a dinner, a dance party, a bar crawl, or attend one, you will need the right props, invitations, decorations, and attire. Do not forget to promote all things sparkly on your eCommerce storefront in the weeks before the party.

Preparing tax statements is a critical part of running an eCommerce business. Regularly collecting accurate and recent income statements help provide business owners with the requisite information to calculate taxes.

Inventory turnover is a financial percentage that measures how effectively a company turns inventory into sales. It is a business metric that speaks to the health of your product business. Calculating and estimating turnover helps businesses establish a framework for what constitutes good pricing, manufacturing, marketing, and purchasing new inventory. To calculate inventory turnover: divide your cost of goods sold (COGS) by your average inventory value.

Conducting quarterly brand performance reviews is valuable for gaining insights into your business’s future prosperity. Measuring your brand’s performance allows you to make strategic decisions about getting customers to engage with your brand. By measuring your brand’s performance, you can increase sales, brand awareness, and traffic to your storefront. However, the work does not stop there. If you are interested in pivoting your approach towards playing the game, you can also conduct an annual or biannual competitor analysis to monitor and anticipate your competitors’ every move.

If you are an active Amazon seller, keeping up with the latest Amazon trends is not only recommended, it is necessary. Any eCommerce business interested in staying afloat and remaining relevant in 2022 will need to adapt to customers’ fast-changing preferences and needs by investing in areas dedicated to creating enhanced online experiences. Five noteworthy trends, in particular, are disrupting the eCommerce industry in 2022.

Mobile commerce, also referred to as m-commerce, describes the use of a mobile device to execute a monetary transaction. It identifies a shift in eCommerce through its ability to enable consumers to buy and sell goods from anywhere, at any time, using a tablet or smartphone. With smartphones becoming a modern-day extension of the human arm, you should prioritize a mobile commerce platform over other design fads. As reported by Statista, in 2020, mobile eCommerce spending in the US reached $47.8 billion. To optimize your storefront to satisfy the mobile, consider using a Progressive Web App (PWA). A PWA is a website that adopts the form of a mobile application to provide more efficient, faster, and aesthetically pleasing mobile experiences.

Social commerce is the conjunction of social media and eCommerce and is expected to impact sales this holiday season. With more than 3.78 billion social media users worldwide, people are increasingly turning to social networks such as Instagram and TikTok to browse the latest products. As a result, brands are responding by meeting their customers halfway. Therefore, your 2022 New Year’s resolution should be to build a more robust social media strategy.

Your new and improved social media strategy should involve:

• Selecting the most suitable platform to engage with potential customers.
• Collaborating with influencers to broaden your reach.
• Incorporating user-generated content to connect with followers and establish an online community.
• Employing live stream shopping to engage followers and showcase products.
• Utilizing paid advertising and in-app purchasing features to increase sales.

Although video marketing is not a new phenomenon, this component of marketing, designed to increase engagement by combining video and social media, is becoming more and more in demand. In an age of instant gratification, people want information, and they want it fast, and video gives them what they want. Disseminating content in video form, be it tutorials, live Q&As, user-generated content, or explanatory videos, have the utmost potential to resonate with customers and influence their buying decisions.

Reviews can make or break both a product and a brand. User-generated content is considered one of the most trusted forms of online content. To tap into this market, create a video marketing strategy that combines live videos, 360 immersive videos, ephemeral videos, vlogs, and social media stories.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have revolutionized eCommerce. Virtual reality can be described as the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment for a user in such a way that makes virtual objects appear real. In comparison, augmented reality allows online shoppers to overlap digital content such as images, sounds, and text, across a real-world environment. Both VR and AR are forecasted to reach roughly $300 billion by 2024.

Augmented reality and virtual reality are inherently pro-consumer. Such technology lets customers preview products in real-time and in their own environment, which eases consumer doubts about purchasing a product that may not satisfy their needs. Recent studies reveal that augmented reality technology can help grow your conversions rates by up to 40 percent. So, do not miss out on a chance to implement this technology into your storefront to increase buyer confidence, lower return rates, and accelerate sales.