5 things you need to do in your store before Black Friday
Black Friday in 2023 falls on November 24. In e-commerce, it is one o
Black Friday in 2024 falls on 29 November. Invariably for all e-commerce, it is one of the most important sales days of the year. In Poland, as in the rest of the world, Black Friday has become hugely popular and many shops offer attractive promotions on this day. Shops see an increase in sales and servers see a surge in website traffic. How do you prepare your online shop for the big sales holiday? Here are 5 things you need to do in your e-commerce before Black Friday.
Black Friday in e-commerce
In the United States, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. Americans celebrate this holiday with family, and an integral part of the celebration is urban parades. Stores along th
In the United States, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. Americans celebrate this holiday with family, and an integral part of the celebrations is the city's parades. Shops along the parade route announce sales, and encourage those celebrating to shop. According to an Adobe report, sales in 2024 compared to 2023 during Black Friday will increase by more than 10 per cent.
The origin of the term Black Friday is not entirely clear. According to one angedote in 1961 in Philadelphia, crowds of shoppers caused many incidents. Local police had to intervene and the entire city was in a huge traffic jam. Other sources say the name refers to accounting notations. Red color was used to indicate losses, black color was used to indicate profits. And during Black Friday (Black Friday), all records were black. Like Halloween or Valentine's Day, the American holiday has also swept into Poland.
How to prepare your store for Black Friday?
There is barely a year in which the upcoming sales day does not come as a surprise to e-commerce owners. Preparations begin far too late. It results in increased demand for IT resources. Especially when it comes to additional e-commerce functionality or increased infrastructure resources.
Below I address the 5 most important elements to pay attention to. Provide the best conditions for customers to complete the purchase. Make sure that customers have the best conditions for a fast and seamless completion of the purchase process.
1. Before Black Friday you need to: prepare the infrastructure
Every e-commerce system must have server space to perform tasks. A characteristic of web-based systems is that the higher the traffic, the more resources are needed. E-commerce owners who have their systems in scalable clouds are in an optimal situation. Whether through autoscaling or manually, you can increase the parameters of the servers (in most cases) without stopping services. That is, the customer does not even see that something has changed. Such an operation is simple to implement.
In a worse situation are systems based on dedicated systems (physical servers, or virtual machines). They are not prepared for such operations. The problem can be solved by duplicating the server (or servers) and connecting them via LoadBalancer. They spread the traffic between machines. However, this requires experience, a lot of technical knowledge and time.
But how to know how much and what needs to be increased?
Here there is no clear answer. The specifics of traffic for each e-commerce platform are different, the resource requirements of the systems are also different. Archived statistics and continuous monitoring of traffic and resource utilization can come to the rescue. Above all, experience counts.
Having secured server space, we can move on to the next point.
2. Check inventory
To think at all about high traffic and profit during Black Friday you need to have something to sell. Last year, I encountered the following situation at one of my clients.
The customer had one of the very popular toys on offer, which was going down on the stump. Sales department made the unconsidered decision to sell this product without checking inventory (backorders). The system was set up and everyone went home. In the morning - panic. More than 40 thousand new orders for this product appeared. First suspicion - someone hacked into the system. But after verification, the orders were real. The product is out of stock, the holidays are coming up and the manufacturer does not confirm availability. Ultimately, most orders end up being canceled and refunded. The brand is losing the trust of customers and its image has been damaged.
Another situation from this year. The client planned a sale on a whole group of products. The marketing department prepared communications on social networks, the technical team prepared increased infrastructure resources, everyone was ready. When the action was launched, the traffic increased for a few beams for a while and returned to normal. The first suspicion - we have a failure. Analysis showed that the total number of items that were prepared for sale was 50. The goods were sold out in the first few minutes. The resources invested had no right to return. And the infrastructure didn't even have time to get sweaty.
Important: prepare the appropriate inventory for Black Friday. Along with these preparations, wisely plan marketing activities and promote products that realistically have a chance to sell!
3. Monitor and report
Ask yourself a question: how will I check if the sales campaign was successful and profitable? Did the sale hit the right target group?
We said about looking at archival traffic data. Predict by how much our store traffic will potentially increase. Also based on information about how fast e-commerce is growing in the country, we can accurately estimate Black Friday traffic this year. But what about analyzing the profitability of Black Friday?
A good practice is to sum up all the costs you spent preparing for Black Friday. You need to divide these costs by the number of items sold. This way you will know how the margin is shaping up. Because it is not an art to clear the warehouses, but to do it in such a way that you use the color black to enter the result.
What costs can be taken into account? We suggest a before and after approach. Before we estimate, after we check carefully whether our estimates came true. Let's check the costs:
- Black Friday marketing campaigns,
- IT, such as infrastructure, special budget for higher availability of platform support team and incident resolution,
- Free delivery,
- Order handling such as preparation for shipping,
- Returns that will occur after Black Friday (failed gifts and customers who have been discontinued),
- Replacement of goods that do not meet customers' expectations (damages),
- Payment gateway commissions and collection fees,
- Customer service department,
- Other unclassified, such as the team responsible for the ecommerce platform.
4. Take care of your store's security
Referring to the article As secure as possible, let's take a moment to focus on monitoring and filtering traffic that may be considered unwanted.
During a sale, your infrastructure starts to reach its limits and you need to decide what to do next. First, see what is actually happening, where visitors are coming from and what the traffic profile is. Take advantage of firewalls and web traffic analysis systems.
For example, your e-commerce platform handles orders to all of Europe. You can see that a large percentage of visitors come from Asia, for example. Since there is no chance for you to place an order and ship it to another continent. What can we do? There is an option to filter traffic based on geolocation data. In a nutshell, the system detects where the visitor is from and can take specific actions. For example, block or redirect the visitor to an information page.
- We do not block "good bots" such as GoogleBots,
- advanced bots aimed at buying discounted goods are constantly improving and can circumvent such protections. Well-chosen traffic filtering rules avoid unnecessary infrastructure expansion costs.
Before Black Friday don't leave preparations to the last minute
According to Murphy's Laws, if something can go wrong it will go wrong. This means to reduce risk and avoid failure, you need to act ahead of time. Prepare content for your Black Friday campaign well in advance. That is, what kind of content?
The kind that allows you to prepare materials and content, enter them into CMS systems. Check that all communication is consistent, and looks exactly as it should. Once you are sure, you can leave the changes as inactive to wait for the day the promotion starts.
With this approach, the risk of failure is kept to a minimum. Probably the worst thing is to launch campaign launch and find out that something that has always worked this time. However, does not demand it. Pulling in technicians to find the cause of the problems can be a challenge. And that's something we want to avoid. In other words, we strongly encourage you to plan tactically in advance.
This year, Black Friday falls on November 24. Consider your action plan today, not only for marketing but also for IT, to be ready. If you have questions or doubts about what you can do to ensure that, write to us! We know from experience how to achieve sales success!