Stuart McClure co-founded Love the Sales back in 2014, when he was looking for products to buy for his young family on a budget. Today he says the marketplace is still focused on selling branded products that shoppers really want to buy – for the right price.
“Consumers on Love the Sales are looking for aspirational, branded products at a discount,” says McClure, chief marketing officer at LovetheSales.com. “To that end, premium brands are the most popular on our site. Our marketplace AI understands every detail of a retail partner’s excess inventory and uses these attributes to match them to millions of consumers who are most likely to make a purchase.”
More than three quarters (77%) of the goods on sales on the marketplace fall into the fashion and beauty category. The rest include electronics, home and garden products. Love the Sales works with brands from upmarket luxury brands to high street ones. McClure says the most popular branded deals on the site come from names including Barbour, Clarks, Nike and Hugo Boss.
Stand out from the crowd
Retailers and retail brands that partner with LovetheSales.com can link up to the site quickly, with sale stock able to be on display in less than a day. But with hundreds selling on the site, it’s also important to stay out from the crowd. McClure say: “To put the right sales product in front of the right customer, there needs to be an element of automation to sort and display millions of different products. Sale products are categorised on the site through our machine learning technology, Minerva. Attributes such as description, price, discount and colour along with many others are crunched by the Minerva AI and then put in front of the right consumer based on their preferences and on site behaviour, to maximise sell through for our retail partners.”
McClure says the marketplace works very closely with brands to sell their overstocked items and uses tools including PR, CRM and social channels as well as its Fashion Ambassador influencer network to spread the word about the latest deals.
Brands can also keep an eye on how it’s going – and how their discounting strategy is working – though a real-time dashboard. “This allows retailers to see what discounted stock is selling across the marketplace and at what percentage,” says McClure. “For example at the height of the first UK lockdown in April 2020, we tracked a huge increase in shopping searches on LovetheSales.com for sweatshirts and joggers (177% and 116% increases in year-on-year demand respectively). This data helps retailers plan future seasonal campaigns, and in the short term informed their pricing strategy on loungewear lines more efficiently.”
Standing out on the site is not only about getting the right imagery – McClure says high quality images have a “huge” impact on conversion, since shoppers want to be able to browse a range of pictures while deciding what to buy. It’s also about making sure the discounting strategy works. “We differentiate our marketplace in the sales arena by offering consumers the largest selection of real-time discounts on current season clothing. In season discounts perform extremely well on our site and shoppers are much happier to bag a current season deal for 30% off than an out of season item with a 70% off price tag. In fact, customers on average save 35% on their first order shopping with LovetheSales.com. That’s why we encourage brands to consider smarter discounting, earlier in the product life-cycle, instead of having to apply unsustainable discounts further down the product life-cycle.”
This interview first appeared in the RetailX Brands and Marketplaces 2021 report. Click here to download and explore the report further.
