Prepare Your Shopify Store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday October 31, 2016 19:00

With the holiday season approaching, it’s time to get your store ready for the sales and promotions, if you haven’t already. Shoppers tend to do almost half of their holiday shopping online. This means that you can capture part of these sales by promoting sales on your Shopify store.

In this post, we’ll take a look at five tips you can use to boost sales during Black Friday (November 25) and Cyber Monday (November 28) this year.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: 1. Highlight your participation today

With less than a month to go for those two days, build a buzz amongst your site visitors and existing customers. Customers should be waiting in anticipation before those days come up. This can also start to mentally trigger customers to consider your store for their shopping during this time.

You can put banners up on your store highlighting the upcoming sale. It can be as simple as adding a header bar to your store. In addition, post on your social profiles and include the upcoming sale in emails to your customers. People will be searching online for Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, and it’s important that your store site or social profile shows up during this search.

Note that you may experience a dip in sales leading up to the two days as some people may hold off on purchasing to get the better deal.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: 2. Manage inventory

As you start promoting the sales and get closer to the days, it’s important that you’re prepared to handle the rush of traffic. Part of this preparation includes having enough inventory to serve the demand. Although people may be purchasing products for themselves, many may be purchasing gifts. Nothing puts a dent in those plans like seeing a product out of stock and not being able to deliver on the standard timeline.

You can avoid losing customers to your competitors by keeping enough stock. You can optimize on it by focusing more on the most popular, or highest sale value items.

Take a look at previous year numbers to see how much you can expect to sell, and order inventory accordingly. If you haven’t had a full year in business, then look at other sales during the year as a proxy based on the marketing efforts you put into those.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: 3. Plan campaign

Promoting the sales doesn’t have to be complicated. On a calendar, plan out your email and social media posts. For each week leading up to the sale events, you can focus on a specific theme – highlighting the sale, showcasing products, your store features, shipping and return policies, etc.

Once you know the themes, create the content in advance and load it into your email management system. You want to be focusing on running your store and fulfilling orders as you get close to the events, rather than coming up with content then.

Take a look at some other email campaigns for inspiration, and the power of lifecycle emails.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: 4. Target industry publications

Part of your promotions leading up to the days can be through industry publications. Reach out to bloggers and gift idea aggregators to include your products and sales in their posts. This can help you reach a new and wider audience.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: 5. Ramp up customer support

Due to the increase in online purchases, the holiday season typically becomes a bottleneck for some business services like shipping. In such cases where orders are delayed from your store, it’s still you who customers are going to call. In addition, customers may also want more information regarding returns processing, etc.

In anticipation of higher volume of customer support, it is important to prepare your team in advance and consider getting seasonal help for support.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Summary

The holidays can be some of the most lucrative days in the year for your eCommerce business. Shoppers expect to receive promotional prices during this time and can hold off on purchasing items until the promotions. As a business, these sales can help you clear inventory before you head into the new year.

You can use the tips above to prepare your store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – two of the early days of sales for the holiday season. You can get more tips about managing your store during holiday shopping in my previous post.

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