Every year there are a few holidays, such as Thanksgiving Day, Christmas, Saint Valentine’s Day, etc. that can be hugely beneficial for your e-commerce business. Of course, some are better than others and usually the best day that can make or break a year is Black Friday. The day between the holidays, when you can combine your outstanding offers with a high product demand.
Nowadays, Black Friday is not only an endless line at the most popular storefronts. In 2018, on November 23rd more than 116 million shoppers are planning to purchase online. As a consequence, you need to be ready to meet the demand. We prepared some last minute tips that will help you prepare your online store to make as much profit on Black Friday as possible.
1. What is trending?
There is no better time than Black Friday for customers to buy the most popular items of the year. Each Holiday season, everybody searches for a perfect present and the easiest way to find one is to follow the trends. Knowing this fact could be beneficial for your business. First, you need to find your target audience. Then, follow social media, influencers and commercials to understand the needs of your audience. After you research popular products, set attractive prices for them. Basically, you can stand out from your competitors with the biggest variety of trending products and the best pricing. Even though there are only a few days left, making crucial changes to certain products will help you win in this year’s Black Friday game.
2. Black November
Most e-sellers start preparing for this day from the 1st of November or even earlier. However, there are still some things that you can control when there are only two days left. Basically, you need to forecast the possible demand and prepare your stock levels. Contact your manufacturers and order more product if needed. Also, if you run your own warehouse, stock up on packaging materials. The main takeaway here is to be prepared to send a large number of orders as fast as possible. Try to utilise the time left before Black Friday as best as you possibly can.
3. Take the full responsibility of shipping
All shoppers have the same goal – to find the best deal. It unifies pricing, quality and delivery. As a result, if you don’t offer free shipping, you should consider doing it at least for Black Friday. Basically, customers tend to pay more for the product if it has free shipping. Also, it is a convenient way to stand out from your competitors. As soon as your customer adds an item to the cart and sees that you additionally charge them for shipping, they can get frightened. Keep in mind that most of their actions are impulsive and rushed by the pressure of Black Friday, so shipping costs could easily turn them away. Another tip is to offer shorter delivery times, to encourage your customers even further.
4. Use what you have
This is often overlooked, but nonetheless a great tip that you can use before and during Black Friday. Don’t rush to send returned items back to the manufacturer. If your product has a slight defect, simply resell it with an additional discount. Also, when a customer returns an unused item, the packaging is usually still damaged, so you can’t sell it as a new product. However, you can list it as like-new or unused and still salvage a profit. Sometimes it helps if you add a larger than the standard discount. When there are only a few days left until Black Friday, you will need as many products as you can get your hands on. Consequently, you should make use of the ones that you already have. There are customers who won’t mind the lesser condition of the packaging if they can get a better price.
5. Be a buyer
Don’t forget that Black Friday is the best time to shop not only for your customers, but for you as well. As an online seller, you can easily spot the best deals and take advantage of them. December is the perfect month for e-commerce, so you could easily resell items that you bought on Black Friday. This way you could load up your inventory cheaply and resell it for a higher price. Keep in mind, that if you use this tip, you should be prepared at least a few days before Black Friday. Basically, you need to find the sellers or products you are interested in, so you could be the first to buy them.
How to optimize order fulfilment for Black Friday?
As mentioned before, Black Friday drastically affects the number of your sales, so you need to be prepared for the sudden increase. You will receive a massive influx of orders, which means you will have to take care of rapidly changing stock levels and quickly fulfil multiple times more orders than usual. Basically, there are two ways to keep up with Black Friday sales – hire temporary employees or use inventory management software. When you compare the expenses needed for both of those options – software wins.
Also, consider that Black Friday requires an effective way to fulfil orders without any human errors. As a consequence, you should use a system that has integrations with multiple shipping carriers, a lot of sales channels and simultaneously allows you to fulfil any order with just a few clicks.
Automated shipping
A well-rounded system can offer you a solution that speeds up your business operations during the whole Black Friday and holiday season rush. Multiorders is an order management software that automates your order fulfilment. Once you receive an order simply click on your chosen shipping carrier’s logo and the software will do the rest. It has integrations with all of the most popular shipping companies and allows you to cherry pick the ones best suited to your needs.
When you ship your order through the software it will auto-update the order status and mark your item as sold. Also, it will automatically update the shipment with a tracking number and you can generate labels in seconds. As a seller, you don’t have to manually check the tracking information, add it or change it. The software allows you to avoid human mistakes and accelerate the order fulfilment.
Inventory management
The holiday season is the time when you need to pay additional attention to your stock levels. They need to be updated as soon as you sell an item. Now imagine how many times you will need to do this during Black Friday. However, our order management system can do it all for you. Multiorders has integrations with all of the most popular sales channels and offers you inventory tracking. Another thing is that the software allows you to work with multiple sales channels. All you need to do is connect your different accounts and as a result, you will have all your clients and their orders in a single platform. It takes seconds to modify pricing, quantities, etc. All the changes you make in this software automatically appear on your sales channel.
Conclusion
Despite the fact, that Black Friday is just around the corner, there are plenty of things that you can take care of. The most important one is to supervise your inventory. Basically, you need to load it up with the trending products and update your stock-list. Also, it could be very beneficial to offer free shipping and re-sell returned items. Keep in mind, that there are software solutions that could automate the most tedious parts of your business, making your Black Friday much easier.
