Can you believe it - Black Friday is this week! Whilst many retailers have started sales early, the official dates for BFCM are still expected to be the biggest shopping period of the season. As eager bargain hunters are gearing up to make the most of sales all over the world of ecommerce, there is still plenty you can do as a Shopify merchant to make sure you’re ready.
Website
Create a back-up
If for whatever reason your site goes down, it helps to have a back up so that you can get your store back on track for BFCM and avoid losing out on potential customers. Use a tool like Rewind to create a back-up of your store so that you’re ready - it makes it easy to back up all your store data and they’ll back up other tools you might be using like Quickbooks.
Read over your product pages and FAQ
BFCM weekend can get really busy - your customer doesn’t want to have to hunt for information and lose out on a deal, and you don’t want to lose them either! The best way to make sure your customers have the information they need is to have a scan through your product pages and FAQ page. Read over product pages and look for anywhere you could add a little extra detail - think links to additional information that they might find useful, adding current shipping times, and updating recommended products. For your FAQ, consider creating a separate section for Black Friday/Cyber Monday issues with current information about customer service wait times, fulfillment times, and shipping information as well as links to relevant sections of your FAQ about product specifications.
Run through your customer journey
While you won’t be able to add any extra features into your customer journey this close to BFCM, you can still go through it and see if there are any copy or content changes you could make to make the experience a little bit better. Things like changing up your product photography, adding extra details to certain pages, including internal links on your checkout page to shipping info etc. Make these little changes that will make a big impact on the customer experience.
Logistics
Order Fulfillment
If you haven’t already done so, map out your fulfillment process step-by-step for easy reference. Doing this will also allow you to see any potential snags in the process that cost you time and can be changed now such as printing and preparing orders in bulk. Double check that you’ve got all the necessary tools to fulfill orders such as packaging materials, and create a fulfillment schedule for the week following BFCM.
Shipping
Keep in regular contact with your chosen shipping partners to ensure that you’re up to date with any delays or issues in their network. That way you can communicate these to your customers quickly. Check if you’ve set up scheduled delivery pick-up times, and communicate these to your team.
Inventory
Keeping track of inventory is very important over BFCM, especially when it comes to your bestsellers and products you’re expecting to be popular. Ensure you’re covered in case these items do go out of stock by having an out of stock notification app set up on your store so you won’t lose those potential customers. If they’re going to miss out on a Black Friday sale, you could even consider offering a smaller discount incentive when stock is replenished to sweeten the deal for them.
Marketing
Create temporary collections
Temporary collections on your store are a great way to highlight any products you really want customers to focus on when they’re shopping for a bargain. Create a couple of temporary collections that highlight items like bestsellers, and products you’re looking to clear inventory of. You should try to coordinate these with what you’re planning to talk about on your social media channels and email marketing campaigns.
Check over your scheduled social media and email automations
You’ll have your hands full over the BFCM period and the week following with order fulfilment, so take some time now to review what you’ve got in the pipeline for social media and email marketing. Check what content is scheduled across your different channels, and look for anywhere you could add a little bit of extra promotion. Plan out when you’ll post some “live” content such as flash sales, inventory being out of stock etc. With your email marketing, look over the content in your automated campaigns - look for anywhere you could add some extra information. Alternatively if you haven’t already done so, set up some basic workflows like welcome campaigns and abandoned cart emails.
Gift Guides
Want an extra bit of extremely effective last minute content you can throw together? Create a gift guide! Make it specific to Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend deals, showcasing some of your best products and deals. Even better if you can give it an additional theme such as gifts for a specific audience, or self-care. Bonus points if you can incorporate keywords to get a little boost for your store’s SEO.
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Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend is incredibly busy, and there can be a lot of stress on the weekend itself and the week following. Going through this checklist now will mean you can enjoy your Thanksgiving knowing that your store is set up for a successful BFCM.