Lunar New Year 2023: Getting your store ready for the year of the rabbit

For cross-border sellers, Lunar New Year, also known as Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, is one of the busiest shopping times of the year. Celebrated by over 1 billion people in China, as well as hundreds of millions of others worldwide, the holiday is among the biggest in the world. Whether you target customers celebrating the New Year, or you rely on Chinese suppliers and shipping agencies, now is the time to get ready.

Here, you’ll find an overview of this year’s Lunar New Year, the Year of the Rat, including the things you’ll need to do to cater to your customers and how to prepare your store to ensure it operates smoothly throughout the holiday.

What is the Lunar New Year?

Lunar New Year is an approximately two-week holiday consisting of family meals, vacations and gift giving. It’s also a period when businesses throughout China close, effectively bringing a significant part of global manufacturing and shipping to a halt.

This year’s celebrations run from the night of January 21st to February 5th, and includes:

• Reunion dinner (January 21st) – The reunion dinner typically consists of several generations of family members reuniting to eat a traditional meal consisting fish, dumplings and spring rolls, among other symbolic foods. After the meal, parents give their children red envelopes filled with money, which symbolizes good luck.

• New Year’s Day (January 22nd) – New Year’s Day involves extensive fireworks displays, younger generations visiting their elders as well as public celebrations in temples and parks.
• Lantern Festival (February 5^th) – Spring Festival celebrations conclude with people sending glowing lanterns into the sky, onto rivers or in lakes.

Targeting spring festival shoppers

Traditional gifts during the Spring Festival include roasted seeds and nuts, home decorations (red lanterns, New Year’s paintings, paper cutouts, etc.) and clothing. However, recent years have seen an increase in traffic on online shopping platforms, such as Shopee, JD.ID and Lazada during the lead up to the New Year.

Moreover, independent webstores can get a slice of the action by selling directly to APAC or to emigrant populations dispersed around the world.

To effectively target these Spring Festival shoppers, it helps to follow several guidelines:

Adjust your product line accordingly

Popular shopping categories during Chinese New Year celebrations include clothing, food and health and beauty products, all of which record significant increases in daily sales ahead of, and during, the holiday. For sellers, it’s important to customize your products by including as much red as possible, as well as images of rabbits to mark the beginning of the year.

Offer A Local Checkout Experience

With the globalization of Lunar New Year celebrations, your audience is no longer just based in Asia Pacific. People from all over the world will want to purchase your goods and expect to be able to do so in their native language and to pay in their local currencies. To ensure you make the most of this opportunity, offer a buying experience that is proven to be quick, easy and localized.

Optimize your store for mobile

Granted, this tip isn’t specific for the Spring Festival, but it’s worth highlighting – if you operate your store outside of the major marketplaces and have not optimized it for mobile, now’s the time. Of the top-10 countries with the highest mobile eCommerce penetration rates, seven are located in Asia, making it imperative that your Lunar New Year promotions be optimized for these devices.

Prepping your store for the spring festival

For sellers relying on Chinese manufacturers and suppliers, Lunar New Year can present several challenges when it comes to keeping your business running at full speed during the holiday.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to deal with the logistics involved in fulfilling your orders during this time of year.

Start your promotions today

With the Spring Festival now considered a global shopping holiday, your customers are likely expecting some sort of holiday-themed promotions. This can be beneficial for several reasons:

• It helps gauge interest in your products – Managing your inventory can be tricky during the Spring Festival (more on that below). By starting your holiday promotions early, you’ll get an idea of which of your products generate the most interest so you can stock up accordingly.
• You can target early shoppers – The days leading up to the holiday can be hectic, with many of your customers travelling to meet family. By targeting customers several weeks before the holiday, you’ll be able to take advantage of those looking to get their shopping out of the way early.
• You’re ensuring on-time deliveries – Getting as many orders as possible shipped several weeks before the holiday helps ensure they get to where they need to be on time. This is especially relevant if you’re using a Chinese dropshipper who is likely to take an extended holiday.

Manage your inventory

While it can be difficult to anticipate how much inventory you’ll need during peak shopping periods, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Stocking up early helps ensure your ability to fulfill orders while your suppliers and manufacturers are on holiday.

Don’t have enough storage space? Look into renting space at a distribution center in a country that takes off fewer days during the Spring Festival, including Singapore and Hong Kong.

Keep your customers informed

Maintaining an open line of communication with your customers is considered best practice throughout the year. During busy shopping holidays, it’s doubly important. You’ll want to include notifications on your store/website informing shoppers of possible delivery delays on account of the holiday. In addition, messages informing users of the last day to place orders to ensure they are delivered on time will help you avoid disgruntled customers further down the line.

Managing your store’s payments with Payoneer

As the leading cross-border payments provider, Payoneer is well placed to help you process your business’s payments throughout the Spring Festival. Our all-in-one solution provides you with the tools you need to build beautiful checkout experiences and manage payments from around the world, all in one place.

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