E-commerce Sellers Guide to Drive Sales during Halloween, All Souls, and All Saints Day in the Philippines

As the spooky festivities approach, Filipinos focus on the days before Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day. While Halloween offers a unique opportunity thanks to the advent of pop culture, movies, and cult experiences, sellers sit on an untapped gold mine to boost e-commerce sales. 

For e-commerce businesses, this time of year is more than just pumpkins and costumes; it’s a golden opportunity to brew up some enchanting sales and connect with customers in the spirit of the season.

Filipinos display high intent of shopping behavior right up to the week leading to Halloween, followed by two critical holidays.  

This guide provides essential tips and tricks for making your online store the go-to destination for Halloween shoppers in the Philippines. From email marketing to wickedly easy shopping experiences, we have all the ingredients for a bewitching success story.

When is Halloween Celebrated in the Philippines?

Halloween falls on October 31st this year. The relatively new holiday has turned into a key retail sales day. Banking on the holiday’s popularity in the US and other countries, Filipinos have begun attending Halloween-themed costume parties, decorating their houses, and trick-or-treating.

What Filippinos shop for ahead of Halloween?

Halloween Sales in the Philippines notices an uptick in holiday-related . There is an increased demand for costumes and clothing, party supplies, specialty food and beverages, arts and crafts and hobbies, makeup and costume accessories, themed merchandise, and home and garden decor retailers. The sale has a broad appeal, making it a lucrative season for online businesses catering to Halloween enthusiasts.

Google Trends pick up that the search volume for candles peaks right before Nov 1, indicating that it is one of the most shopped items ahead of All Souls Day and All Saints Day.

Shoppers in the Philippines are expected to buy ahead of Halloween, All Souls Day, and All Saints Day: 

• Clothes and Accessories
• Cosmetics
• Shelf-stable Confectionaries
• Candles
• Home Decor
• Party Supplies
• Home Appliances
• Home Supplies and Cleaning Accessories

How E-commerce Seller Can Leverage Halloween Sale 2024

As the retail shopping peaks before the major sales day, sellers can use this time to run a sale and attract shoppers. So whether you run a custom website or rely on marketplaces like Shopee, Lazada or TikTok shop, here are ways to help you maximize sales during Halloween sale and extend it to cater to All Souls Day sale as well.

Spooktacular Store Decor

Halloween is about transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, and your online store should be no exception. Decking out your e-commerce website in Halloween-themed decor sets the mood and engages your visitors. Here’s how to give your site a spine-chilling makeover:

A. Dressing Up Your Website for Halloween

Imagine your website as a haunted mansion; your visitors are the brave explorers. The first thing they encounter is your site’s design. Incorporate Halloween-inspired colors, fonts, and graphics to give your site a ghostly ambiance. Swap out your usual banner images for spooky ones, and consider adding Halloween-themed icons and animations. Even small changes like eerie hover effects on buttons can significantly impact. Consider exploring apps to help you implement to give your online store the Halloween look.

B. Creating a Festive Homepage Banner

Your homepage is the grand entrance to your Halloween party, so make it unforgettable. Design a captivating Halloween-themed banner or if you’re pressed for time, you can download pre-made halloween-themed banner for your store. Further, include elements that showcase your spooktacular deals, special offers, and new arrivals. Use high-quality images of Halloween products or incorporate playful and frightening graphics to entice visitors. Don’t forget to include a catchy Halloween slogan or tagline to set the tone.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a potent cauldron for brewing up Halloween sales. It allows you to reach your audience directly and cast a spell of enchantment over them. To conjure up successful Halloween email campaigns, follow these spellbinding practices:

A. Crafting Hauntingly Good Email Campaigns

Start by designing email templates that are bewitching and in line with the Halloween spirit. Use dark and mysterious colors, eerie fonts, and thematic images. Craft subject lines that pique curiosity and include Halloween-themed emojis. Your email content should be engaging, offering value to your subscribers. Share spookly good to be true offers stories, tips, or DIY ideas related to your products. And don’t forget to add clear and enticing call-to-action buttons that lead to your Halloween offers. 

B. Segmenting Your Email List for Personalization

Every ghoul and goblin has different preferences. Segment your email list based on customer behavior, purchase history, and interests. This allows you to send tailored content that resonates with each segment. If you have shoppers who used a digital wallet, ensure they will receive a campaign that exclusively talks about digital wallets for purchase and not COD. For example, recommend costumes, shop the look ideas to those who have bought costumes before or suggest easy to create Halloween decorations to DIY enthusiasts. Personalization increases engagement and conversions.

C. Sending Out Exclusive Halloween Promotions

Treat your email subscribers to exclusive Halloween promotions and discounts. Use words like “spooktacular savings,” “frighteningly good deals,” or “limited-time Halloween offers” to create a sense of urgency. Highlight the uniqueness of your Halloween-themed products and emphasize that these deals are available only for a limited period. Encourage subscribers to shop early for their Halloween needs.

Fangtastic Product Showcase

In the world of e-commerce, showing off your Halloween-themed products in a captivating way can be the key to conjuring up sales. Here’s how to create a product showcase that sends shivers down your visitors’ spines:

A. Highlighting Halloween-themed Products

First and foremost, identify your Halloween-themed products. These could be costumes, decorations, special treats, pumpkin spice mixes or anything that suits the spooky season. Once you’ve curated this collection, give them the spotlight they deserve. Create a dedicated section or category on your website for Halloween. Use thematic banners, fonts, and colors to make it clear that these items are designed for the spookiest time of the year.

B. Creating Spooky Product Bundles

Encourage your customers to purchase more by crafting eerie product bundles. Pair complementary items together, such as a costume with matching accessories, or a set of Halloween decorations. Offer a slight discount when items are bundled, creating an incentive for customers to buy more. You can also name these bundles creatively, like “Witch’s Essentials Kit” or “Haunted House Starter Pack.”

C. Using High-Quality Product Images

Don’t be afraid to invest in high-quality images of your Halloween products. High-resolution, well-lit, and detailed images can captivate your audience and make them more likely to make a purchase. Show your products from various angles, and if possible, showcase them in real-life settings. Include close-ups to highlight intricate details that set your products apart from the rest.

Killer Content Marketing Tricks

When it comes to Halloween, content is king. Your online store isn’t just about products; it’s an opportunity to engage your audience with captivating stories, spooky tales, and creative contests. Here’s how to brew up a potion of captivating content:

A. Writing Halloween-themed Blog Posts

Blogging is a bewitching way to draw in your audience. Craft Halloween-themed blog posts that resonate with your products or industry. For example, if you sell home decor, write about “Transforming Your Home into a Haunted Haven.” If you’re in the fashion industry, create a post on “The Perfect Halloween Costume Ideas for 2023.” These posts not only provide value but also keep your audience engaged.

B. Creating Halloween-inspired Social Media Content

Your social media platforms are cauldrons of creativity during Halloween. Get into the spirit by decorating your profiles with Halloween-themed banners and profile pictures. Share spooky stories, eerie anecdotes, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of your business’s Halloween preparations. Encourage user-generated content by asking your followers to share their Halloween celebrations with your products.

C. Running Halloween-themed Contests and Giveaways‘

Trick or treat? Treat your customers to Halloween-themed contests and giveaways. It’s a fantastic way to boost engagement and generate excitement. Ask your audience to share their scariest stories, creative costume ideas, or photos of how they use your products in their Halloween festivities. Reward the winners with ghoulishly good prizes, such as discounts, exclusive products, or even Halloween-themed merchandise.

Ghoulish Discounts and Promotions

Halloween is all about treats, and your customers will appreciate nothing more than some fangtastic discounts and promotions. Unearth the secrets to a successful Halloween sales strategy:

A. Offering Spine-Chilling Discounts

Trick-or-treaters aren’t the only ones who love surprises; your customers do too! Offer bewitching discounts that make their eyes light up like jack-o’-lanterns. Whether it’s a percentage off, buy-one-get-one-free deals, or bundles of spooky products at a reduced price, your discounts should be too good to resist.

B. Running Limited-time Flash Sales

Add an element of urgency to your Halloween sales with flash sales. These time-bound, heart-pounding events encourage quick decision-making. For example, you could have a “Midnight Madness” sale that lasts only for a few hours, offering jaw-dropping discounts on select products. Make sure to promote these flash sales in advance to build anticipation.

C. Providing Exclusive Halloween Coupons

Trick-or-treaters search for hidden treasures, and your customers can too with exclusive Halloween coupons. Send these spine-tingling offers to your email subscribers or social media followers as a reward for their loyalty. Encourage them to redeem these coupons during their Halloween shopping spree, creating a sense of exclusivity and excitement.

Wickedly Easy Shopping Experience

In the spirit of Halloween, make your online store as inviting as a haunted house but with a much smoother experience. Here’s how to simplify the shopping process and keep your customers coming back for more:

A. Streamlining the Checkout Process

Nothing’s scarier to shoppers than a long and complicated checkout process. Keep it quick and easy. Reduce the number of clicks and form fields required to complete a purchase. Implement guest checkout options so customers don’t have to create an account if they don’t want to. Offer clear progress indicators and secure payment options for a seamless transaction.

B. Implementing Mobile Optimization

In an era where shoppers are increasingly using their smartphones, ensure your website is mobile-optimized. Test your site’s responsiveness on different devices and screens to guarantee a spook-free mobile shopping experience. Large buttons, easy navigation, and fast loading times are the keys to success.

C. Offering Multiple Payment Options

Give your customers the freedom to choose their preferred payment method. While credit and debit cards are common, consider adding digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later options, and even cryptocurrency if applicable. The more diverse your payment options, the more inclusive your Halloween shopping extravaganza.

Customer Engagement and Social Proof

Halloween is all about community and shared experiences. Engage your customers, build trust, and create a spooky-good shopping atmosphere with these strategies:

A. Encouraging User-Generated Halloween Content

Harness the creativity of your customers by encouraging them to share their Halloween-themed content related to your products. Create a unique hashtag and invite customers to post pictures, videos, or stories featuring their purchases. You can host a contest for the best user-generated content, offering prizes or discounts as incentives. This not only showcases your products in real-life scenarios but also creates a sense of belonging among your customers.

B. Showcasing Customer Reviews and Testimonials

Make good use of social proof to build trust. Display customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials prominently on your website. Highlight any positive feedback related to Halloween purchases. When potential customers see that others have had a great shopping experience, they’ll feel more confident in making their own spooky selections.

C. Hosting Virtual Halloween Events

Get into the spirit of Halloween by hosting virtual events. Live-stream product showcases, costume contests, or Halloween-themed tutorials. Engage with your audience in real-time through comments and questions. These events not only provide entertainment but also offer opportunities for exclusive promotions and interaction with your brand.

How E-commerce Fulfillment can help double down on Halloween Sale 2024 success?

The success of your Halloween sale in 2024 lies in a combination of factors like listing out sale items that shoppers are most likely to buy. But with an e-commerce fulfillment partner like Locad, you can save smart and offer products at great discounts to maintain a healthy profit margin ahead of Halloween, All Souls Day, and All Saints Day sales.

Choosing your Halloween Sale Items: Filippino Sellers can confirm their product catalog for Halloween with Locad’s Logistics Engine. The dashboard offers sellers information on current inventory on hand, the products that sold well during the past couple of weeks and non-seasonal items that have great potential to be bundled and cleared off without accumulating high holding costs.

Fast Fulfillment with Distributed Stock Management: Sellers can choose to split and store inventory ahead of Halloween across Locad’s warehouses across the Philippines to gain nationwide coverage. Sellers get to store inventory close to shoppers for faster pick, pack, and dispatch while keeping shipping costs low to cater to early shoppers and last-minute buyers.

Running Multi-channel Halloween Sales: E-commerce sellers in the Philippines can rely on Locad to seamlessly connect with their online stores on Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, and custom websites to automate order processing. By running sales on multiple online stores, Sellers in the Philippines can use Locad’s infrastructure to fulfill orders on time and manage different footfall across these channels through smart marketplace-specific inventory lock.

Fearless Selling with Delightful Rates: Halloween, All Souls Day, and All Saints Day can cause an increase in e-commerce activity. Tying up with singular last-mile partners can give you scares due to increased rates during peak retail sales days. With Locad, e-commerce sellers can partner with top last-mile carriers across the Philippines and get preferential shipping rates. Combined with Locad’s auto-assigning of the cheapest carrier, Sellers during Halloween sales can significantly reduce fulfillment costs.

Customized Halloween-themed Packing: Make sure your e-commerce orders are packed in Halloween-themed packaging for a great unboxing and branding experience. Specify picking and packing instructions and the void fillers or marketing inserts to turn one-time shoppers into repeat buyers ahead of peak retail seasons. 

Manage Sales with Demand Forecasting: E-commerce sellers can analyze predictive sales patterns ahead of Halloween, All Souls Day, and All Saints Day to estimate the volume of inbound orders. By logging these forecasts in Locad’s Logistics Engine, sellers can ensure that the warehouses have the manpower to handle the surge in orders without breaching the Halloween order fulfillment SLAs. 

Inventory prepping for Halloween Bundles: When you see recurring patterns and popularly purchased bundles, tap into this opportunity ahead of Halloween sales. With Locad, add labels for localized selling and bundle products in inventory together in advance. Increase the saleability of slow-moving stock, increase Halloween sales order value through this effort, and reduce the time required for pick and pack.  

Halloween Order Tracking: Get shareable live tracking to share with shoppers and give them transparency into the order fulfillment journey. Make sure that shoppers reach out to your support team only when required and they have enough information to follow through with their orders without any assistance.

Conclusion

This guide is your secret potion for a spellbinding sales season. By creating a spooktacular shopping experience, showcasing your products with flair, and engaging customers with captivating content, you’ll be well on your way to a record-breaking Halloween. Remember, Halloween isn’t just about costumes and candy; it’s a golden opportunity for e-commerce businesses to thrive. So, brew up your marketing cauldron, cast away the cobwebs, and let the sales roll in. Download our Halloween Sales Checklist and prepare for a howling success like never before!

Downloadable Halloween Sales Checklist

Preparing Your E-commerce Store for a Spooktacular Season

Store Decor

• Dress up your website with Halloween-themed graphics and visuals.
  • Free Assets: Free Images, FreePik, ShutterStock 
• Design a festive homepage banner to welcome visitors.

Email Marketing

• Craft engaging Halloween email campaigns.
  • Top Subject lines for your email blasts:
    • Spooky Savings Await You!
    • Discover Halloween Gear!
    • Witchy Halloween Fun!
    • Fang-tastic Halloween Deals!
    • Treats, No Tricks Await!
    • Scary Good Discounts Here!
    • Halloween is Approaching!
    • Masked Savings Just In!
    • Ghoulish Discounts Await
    • Boo-kmark These Amazing Deals
• Segment your email list for personalized promotions.
  • Abandoned Cart List: Shoppers who abandoned their cart during previous purchases.
  • New Shopper List: Newly acquired customers who made a purchase from you recently.
  • Past Shoppers: List of customers who have been shopping on your online store multiple times.
  • Subscription Shoppers: Customers who have purchased items that require a renewal/restock reminder.
  • Loyalty list: List of customers who have signed up to your loyalty program.
  • Product Returns: This includes a list of customers who had to return the products that they purchased from you.
  • Stock-out issues: This includes a list of shoppers who expressed interst in buying a product but could not do so due to the item running out of stock
  • Birthday List: A master list of all shoppers who celebrate their birthdays in the month of October
• Send out exclusive Halloween discounts and offers.

Product Showcase

• Highlight Halloween-themed products on your website.
• Create spooky product bundles for extra savings.
• Ensure high-quality product images to entice shoppers.

Content Marketing

• Write Halloween-themed blog posts to engage your audience.
  • Sale Announcement posts: Let your followers know whats in store for them during this Halloween sale.
  • Shop the Look/Get the theme post: Tease followers by giving a preview of how products on sale can be assembeled to match the Halloween theme.
  • Halloween This or That: Conduct polls and surveys to learn more about your followers’ plans and preferences during the Halloween.
  • Past UGC: Share content of what shoppers purchased last Halloween and the impact your product made.
  •  Halloween-themed recipies: Show how your products can be used to make edible items, diy projects or simply paired with accessories to give a halloween themed look.
• Create Halloween-inspired social media content.
  • Trending Halloween Hashtags to use:
    • #HalloweenSale
    • #HalloweenDeals
    • #SpookySavings
    • #TrickOrTreat
    • #HalloweenDiscounts
    • #HauntedSales
    • #Boo-tifulBargains
    • #GhoulishGoodies
    • #CostumeDiscounts
    • #ScarySavings
    • #CreepItReal
    • #FangtasticDeals
    • #WitchyOffers
    • #ShopHalloween
    • #HalloweenShopping
    • #PumpkinSale
    • #HalloweekendSale
    • #MonsterMarkdowns
    • #HalloweenClearance
    • #OctoberOffers
• Plan and run Halloween-themed contests and giveaways.
  • Virtual Costume Contest
  • Scavenger Hunt
  • Virtual Pumpkin Carving Contest
  • Promote Mystery Halloween-theme boxes
  • Share Halloween Playlist
  • Host Halloween Quizes and Trivias

Discounts and Promotions

• Offer spine-chilling discounts to attract shoppers.
• Run limited-time flash sales for urgency.
• Provide exclusive Halloween coupons for added savings.
  • SPOOKY10: Get 10% off your Halloween order.
  • GHOSTLY15: Use this code for 15% off Halloween costumes.
  • HAUNT20: Enjoy 20% off all Halloween decorations.
  • CREEPY5OFF: Take 50₱ off your Halloween purchase.
  • WITCHY20: Save 20% on all witch-themed products.
  • BOO25: Get a scary-good 25% discount on select items.
  • TREATME10: Treat yourself to 10% off Halloween treats.
  • MASKUP15: Score 15% off Halloween masks and accessories.
  • SCARYSAVINGS: Enjoy spooky savings storewide!
  • PUMPKINPARTY: Join the pumpkin party with 20% off.
  • FANGTASTIC5: Sink your teeth into a ₱75 discount.
  • GHOULISHGIFTS: Take 15% off Halloween gift sets.
  • WICKEDWEEKEND: Weekend special: 10% off your order.
  • SKELETON25: Save 25% on skeleton-themed products.
  • MONSTERDEALS: Unleash monstrous savings with 30% off.

Shopping Experience

• Streamline the checkout process for a hassle-free experience.
• Optimize your website for mobile shoppers.
• Offer multiple payment options for convenience.

Customer Engagement

• Encourage user-generated Halloween content using a unique hashtag.
• Showcase customer reviews and testimonials related to Halloween purchases.
• Host virtual Halloween events, like costume contests or product showcases.

Frequently Asked Questions