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Preparing Your Business for Black Friday: Essential Checklist for Retailers

6 min read

It’s that time of year when the festive spirit takes over and people are busy gifting, traveling, and enjoying the holiday season. For shoppers, it’s all about finding the perfect gifts for loved ones, but for retailers, the big question is: can your platform handle the influx of excited shoppers during this rush? With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, comes the biggest shopping event of the year. Your platform must be ready to handle the increased traffic without faltering.

To help you gear up for this massive shopping spree, here’s a 7-point checklist to ensure your platform is fully prepared for Black Friday to help you get started.

Diving deeper, we’ll explore the key strategies that you can inculcate to sustain during Black Friday. Toward the end, we will skim through the benefits of a unified commerce platform for supporting your festive season.

Black Friday-Cyber Monday Preparation: A Must-have Checklist for Retailers

For retailers, effective preparation for Black Friday involves more than just slashing prices and offering discounts. One must be prepared for Black Friday with a comprehensive plan. A plan that must include everything from inventory control to marketing.

The U.S. retail sales between Black Friday and Cyber Monday are forecast to rise 5% year over year to $75 billion for the first time, according to a new Bain & Company report, and the Black Friday week sales will likely outgrow total holiday sales.

Well, the Black Friday-to-Cyber Monday checklist is as follows:

1. Inventory management and fulfillment

The first step is to conduct an inventory audit and stock up on high-demand items early. The category can be curated based on the buyer’s purchasing pattern over the past few months.

You could also use a unified system to manage inventory to ensure smoother sales across all channels. A move that can help you consolidate data in a single place and make it accessible on all of your hand-held devices. Besides, implement automated restocking using sensors to send you automated alerts—a smart move with a smart IoT sender to avoid stockouts during the holiday rush.

2. Website and mobile optimization

The second step is to ensure your website and mobile are optimized for speed and user experience. Your e-commerce website must be able to handle the additional traffic.

With most people utilizing their hand-held devices, it is thus crucial to get your platform mobile-ready.

a-woman-sitting-shopping-bags browsing her phone

To prepare yourself well, perform load testing to handle the anticipated surge in traffic on Black Friday. To add to this, you can optimize product pages with high-quality images, descriptions, and customer reviews to capture your audience and keep them hooked. Consider offering live chat to guide eager shoppers quickly.

3. Personalized offers and customer segmentation

Black Friday deals need to be broadcast and showcased across channels well before the sale day. You may utilize customer data to create segmented offers based on purchase behavior and preferences.

  • To grow your loyal customer base, it is important to make them feel special and taken well care of. Maybe pop in a reasonable discount when buying a product worth a certain amount in the cart, gift them samples of the wishlist items, add a sample of a perfume that they searched for, or add a voucher to a popular holiday destination.
  • In addition, you can also offer a first-time buyer’s bonus as well as reduce the fee for being a loyal customer. To recruit more customers into loyalty, one can guarantee that any certain quantity of purchase qualifies someone as a loyal customer or make them buy more by awarding them points that will at long last make them remain loyal.

Include actions like free shipping will decrease the backclicks, ensuring better conversions. Did you know that there is so much loss of sales due to a meager amount of shipping cost?

Flexible fulfillment options such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), or even expedited shipping. The convenience of shopping can be multiplied with these features and appeal to high-end shoppers during Black Friday.

4. Pricing strategy and promotions

Black Friday is synonymous with discounts, and a real-time update of promotions and pricing based on purchasing will ensure your associates have real-time knowledge on how to increase the cart value.

Implement upselling and cross-selling strategies using the unified data you have collected about your customers. For instance, if a customer has purchased a satin shirt, he or she might be interested in a scarf to complete the look and that you would wish to recommend next. Similar to offering socks for a shoe purchase. These hints further enhance how many items they place into their cart.

Furthermore, combining small types of products into kits can attract consumers who need small-sized items for traveling and vacationing and who do not need bulkier and full-sized items.

5. Marketing and advertising across channels

As a retailer, you must ensure your presence is well-noticed across the various social platforms. You can initiate a full-fledged marketing campaign that will further promote the Black Friday deals that can get people to notice that an item on their wishlist will be on sale soon.

Launch a teaser campaign a few weeks before Black Friday to build excitement. Use social media, email, and paid ads to promote your offers across multiple channels and create awareness. To add to the credibility of your products, collaborate with influencers or partners to increase your reach and tap into their viewers.

Moving further down the funnel, you can create custom ads for people based on their unique customer preferences and interests. This is similar to running ads on Instagram that are clicked through and directing the users to buy them.

6. Payment flexibility and checkout optimization

As we spoke of free shipping, a minor glitch in the payment can make a customer click back from the site. A disappointed and unhappy customer promotes the wrong word of mouth. To make sure that never happens, ensure your payment options cater to all customer preferences (credit cards, digital wallets, gift cards, etc.).

Streamline the checkout process to minimize cart abandonment. Platforms are offering one-click checkouts, and this can be a game-changer during the holidays. Offer mobile payment options and ensure a secure, quick checkout experience.

Besides, to bring about convenience in the overall shopping experience, one must also bring about variety in the way things are viewed—for example, BOPIS and BORIS. Options like BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) and BORIS (buy online, return in-store) add convenience and show your commitment to customer satisfaction.

7. Post-purchase engagement 

Post-purchase engagements are crucial for businesses, and sending follow-up emails thanking customers for the purchase or creating room for conversation can truly help make customers fall in love with the brands.

Connect with customers with loyalty programs with surveys or offer them complementary products. Even send gift cards to top spenders; if it’s enticing enough, this will ensure repeat purchases.

a hand writing Gift-cards

The Importance of a Unified Commerce Platform for Retailers

A unified commerce platform integrates your front office and back office systems. It gives the business a real-time, 360-degree view of your business, ensuring all your business processes are running smoothly. Instead of silos and disconnected systems, a unified cloud-based platform serves to be invaluable during high-demand events like Black Friday.

 

Here’s why retailers should invest in a unified commerce platform for Black Friday:

1. Creating a seamless and consistent omnichannel experience:

Unified commerce connects online, in-store, and mobile touchpoints. It is far easier to ensure customers receive a consistent, premium experience when we have a single platform to oversee the business O&M. Whether they are shopping online, in-store, or via social media, their interactions should feel effortless.

2. Real-time inventory management:

When a real-time inventory lookup is available, the business gets a precise understanding of what’s available. They can control the restocking and update stocks instantly, preventing overselling or stockouts—a critical concern during Black Friday when demand peaks.

3. Personalized customer experiences:

With access to integrated customer data, you can create bespoke experiences and personalization. You can tailor offers, product recommendations, and loyalty rewards to individual shoppers, aligning with the high expectations of luxury consumers.

4. Increased operational efficiency:

Globally centralized data and processes help to remove operational constraints. This can be done by cutting cycle time for fulfillment and returns and differentiating QVC (Quality Value Convenience) in customer service. This flexibility is important during Black Friday because the pace at which transactions are made is relatively high.

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