The countdown has begun. The holidays are nearly upon us.
Now I realize that technically it’s still summer but with 113 days until Christmas and only 81 days until Black Friday it’s time to start planning for the biggest day in retail if you haven’t already. Before you know it Black Friday will be right around the corner and the more prepared you are the better.
Here are 5 ways to prepare your ecommerce store for Black Friday
Determine Your Deals
First things first: what are your sales going to be? Planning out your sales should be the first thing you do because that will play into everything else you’re doing to prepare. What sales and discounts you offer will depend on your product offering. If you don’t have a wide array of products then obviously your options are limited but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it.
A classic way to structure your Black Friday deals is to feature one high-ticket item at a good discount to draw people in and then upsell them on other products. For example, if you sell sports nutrition supplements, you could mark your protein 20% off or buy one get one half off and then feature other secondary offers on the site like 10% off vitamins.
Including flash sales with a time or quantity limit is also a great way to drive up conversion. This type of scarcity makes customers more likely to pull the trigger since they’re nervous about missing out on a great deal.
Whatever you do though, make sure it’s worth it to the customer. Black Friday deals should be some of your best offers for the whole year. If your top products aren’t on sale customers might not purchase anything due to your disappointing deals.
Take Stock of Your Inventory
Now that you know what your deals are going to look like, it’s time to make sure your inventory is in order. The only thing worse than having too much inventory that doesn’t move is not having enough.
Running out of inventory, especially on a Black Friday deal, is leaving money on the table. Imagine you do all this work to prepare for your big sale and then, just when everyone is busting down your door to buy, you run out of inventory. Horror of horrors!
Not only will you be missing out on sales that day you might miss out on future sales too due to angry customers. An angry customer is a customer that might not ever come back. What a waste of time and marketing spend!
To make sure you have enough inventory look back at previous years to see how you did. If you think you’ll do even better this year, plan accordingly. Make sure that you place any necessary orders well within your typical lead time, remember your manufacturer will also be busy during this time too.
Don’t put your top products on sale leading up to Black Friday if you’re planning on featuring them, you don’t want to deplete your stock or give customers sale fatigue.
Optimize Your Website
Now is the time to prepare your website for a potential onslaught of online shoppers. This will pay off now and in the future. Any updates you make to your site won’t just make a difference on Black Friday but well into the future. Unlike paid ads, upgrading your website is the gift that keeps on giving after you’ve stopped spending money on it.
Here are a few things you’ll want to check
- Website Load Capacity
- Usability
- Mobile Friendly
Website Load Capacity – Ecommerce stores are similar to brick and mortar stores in the fact that they only have so much capacity. It’s easy to forget about this fact when we don’t actually see how “big” online stores are but when your site is overloaded with visitors it definitely has the potential to crash. This obviously isn’t good.
You can load test your website using tools like LoadImpact.com. Certain ecommerce platforms, like Shopify, are already setup to prevent your site from overloading.
Usability – Again, just like a physical store you want your ecommerce store to be easy to navigate. Physical stores have signage and employees to help customers find what they’re looking for, ecommerce stores have UX (user experience).
Making your site simple and your products easy to find is essential. While website design is important, none of that matters if customers can’t find what they’re looking for.
There are services and agencies that can help you optimize your website for the best experience possible but if you don’t have the funds, try instead having someone with fresh eyes navigate your site. Pick a friend, a friend-of-a-friend, or family member (ideally a few different people) and ask them to find a few things your site. Have them give you feedback on their experience and see if there’s anything you need to work on.
Mobile Friendly – Last but certainly not least, you NEED to ensure that your ecommerce store is mobile friendly. Customers are shopping and purchasing using their mobile devices more and more. So whether Black Friday is the excuse you need to make this happen, you need to make this happen!
During Thanksgiving 2016, mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic for the first time. About 26% of orders came through a mobile device between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So make sure your site is ready for mobile visitors.
If there’s one thing you take away from this section it’s that you need to hop on the mobile train now so that you’re full steam ahead come Black Friday.
Make Your Marketing Plan
With everything set to welcome and win over customers new and old, you have plenty of time to craft a well-rounded marketing campaign to drive people to your online store. All your hard work prepping for Black Friday won’t matter much if your marketing fails to catch people’s attention.
Drafting up a marketing plan for Black Friday will help you get a handle on how much work you’ll have to do. It will also help to ensure consistent branding and messaging across the entire campaign, from emails to social posts.
Planning this far in advance will allow you time to hire any extra help if you need it in order to create your banners, ads, emails, etc. This is important because you don’t just want to wait until the day of Black Friday to start marketing and advertising your deals. You should start teasing your offers a few weeks beforehand to get your customers hyped.
Here are a few ways to market your Black Friday deals:
- Social media (organic)
- Social media ads (i.e. Facebook ads)
- Google PPC ads
- Black Friday landing page
- Affiliate marketing
Figure Out Your Fulfillment
Now that you’ve prepared for everything leading up to the sale and purchase, now it’s time to prepare for what comes after: order fulfillment. Some people get so caught up in trying to make as many sales as possible that they forget to make sure they have the capacity to fill those sales.
Having an awesome Black Friday can be like a double edged sword if you’re not prepared. Like I mentioned before, Black Friday is a great opportunity to make your customers happy and leave a great impression but if things don’t go well (like orders getting backed up for weeks) customers will just be left with a bad taste in their mouth. Late deliveries can also result in bans from ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon and eBay and you definitely don’t want that to happen.
Upgrading your entire fulfillment process isn’t the answer though. It doesn’t make sense financially to upgrade your fulfillment process to meet seasonal needs. This is especially true if you won’t see an ROI on these upgrades when you go back to your normal sales volume.
Instead it makes more sense for you to outsource your order fulfillment to another company that specializes in ecommerce fulfillment. Ecommerce fulfillment companies, like Ship Central Fulfillment, are specifically designed to handle this kind of seasonal traffic. Your customers get their orders on time and you get to focus on making your Black Friday a huge hit!
At Ship Central Fulfillment we help companies of all sizes grow because help save time and potentially even money. This is time you can reinvest back into your business.
The Takeaway
It might still be summer but now is the time to look ahead to the busiest retail season of the year. Before you know it Black Friday will be here to kick off the holiday shopping season which makes now the right time to prepare.
As an ecommerce company you should be putting just as much time, if not more, into preparing for the upcoming sale season. While there is a long list of to-dos you need to check off, at Ship Central Fulfillment we can help shorten that list by handling your order fulfillment for you.