How To Prepare Your Ecommerce Store For Black Friday

How important is Black Friday for ecommerce stores?

After the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., Black Friday and Cyber Monday usher in the beginning of the holiday shopping season and are commonly seen as the start of the shopping extravaganza.

These are momentous occasions for you and your patron. People get a thrill from getting amazing bargains on items and services, prompting them to make purchases.

In just the United States, people spent a combined total of $19.7 billion on Black Friday and Cyber Monday in retail.

An increasing number of clients are purchasing through the internet and preferring to look for digital bargains instead of visiting brick-and-mortar establishments. Due to the coronavirus outbreak or to steer clear of the throngs of people.

Hence, you predict that you will increase your sales during these periods. This serves as evidence that smaller and larger companies experienced a huge surge in their sales last year, with Adobe and Magento Commerce estimating figures of 545% and 573% respectively.

The History of Black Friday

The most common story related to the tradition of Black Friday is that retailers typically operated at a loss for most of the year based on the statements of their financial accounts. When the holiday shopping period started on the day following Thanksgiving, merchants reckoned that they would at long last start to make a gain. Their financial records revealed this shift, going from a deficit to a surplus.

The accepted legend surrounding Black Friday does not tell the entire story; rather, the actual history of this event is distinctive from what has been commonly believed.

It is stated by Business Insider that the phrase “Black Friday” was derived in the U.S. during the 1950s when Philadelphia police gave it the name due to the mayhem occurring the day after Thanksgiving.

Tourists particularly liked to travel around this period due to both the Thanksgiving festivities and the classic Army-Navy competition that took place. Philadelphia businesses in the area later attempted to switch the name “Black Friday” due to the depressing perception linked to the words. They promoted Big Friday, however the term Black Friday persisted.

By 2003, Black Friday had grown in popularity to the point where it was the single most popular shopping day in the US and its position has yet to be supplanted. The renowned shopping occasion during the holiday season has been expanded to other areas around the globe.

Although Thanksgiving is customarily observed in North America, the UK and Australia have taken up the trend of Black Friday shopping.

Similar to what happened in the United States, the phrase “Black Friday” in the United Kingdom was popularized by local law enforcement. This is a contrast to Black Friday, which typically occurs on the Friday immediately before Christmas. There was an increase in calls for help to Police and hospitals over the last weekend before vacation started, as people celebrated and had fun.

Australia and New Zealand are not exempt from the online shopping opportunities available in the United States. In 2015, significant organizations in New Zealand such as The Warehouse started recognizing how essential the retail holiday was by providing their own offers.

How to prepare your Black Friday ecommerce store

Ecommerce retailers are especially bustling on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2021, a potential total of 88 million customers in the United States completed a purchase on Black Friday.

Consumers anticipate that they should be able to move around in your online store, explore the items on offer, and make purchases fast and smoothly, no matter how much web traffic your website receives.

As the shopkeeper, you must guarantee that your business is up to the expected level of excellence in order to keep your patrons loyal on such occasions. And here’s how you do it.

Check your website basics

Begin by ensuring your website is working correctly and that there are no obvious issues that could cause difficulties for you on Black Friday.

This includes making sure:

All buttons are visible and working correctly.
Navigation links are visible and working throughout your website.
The stock indicated on the website is up to date.
Your site is secure, and your privacy and cookie policies are up to date.
Your contact page contains the right information
and so on.

It is possible to examine the functioning of a site from the public-facing side before diving into the technical details of an audit.

Make sure your site is fast enough

When customers are seeking to complete purchases swiftly in order to benefit from the bargains you have given, the speed at which your site loads is incredibly important. The speed of your website affects not merely the customer experience but also your website’s SEO and its rank on the SERP.

Optimizing your site’s speed will enable you to:

Ensure customers easily find your ecommerce site from their browsers.
Allow customers to complete purchases quickly and easily to limit cart abandonment.

You can use the following techniques to make sure your website runs quickly and pinpoint the parts you can enhance.

Get general analytics with Google PageSpeed Insights

A free application that informs you of how your website pages function on various types of electronics. It furnishes info from a contained setting to aid you in discovering the aspects that need betterment. It also offers field info to assist you in seeing if your changes have yielded positive results.

Get specific analytics with GTmetrix

GTmetrix surpasses the basics, furnishing users with results concerning different contexts. You can examine your website’s pages under a variety of circumstances such as different countries, web browsers, and internet speeds. The only downside is that you need to cover the cost.

It is essential to confirm that your mobile site is running quickly since many customers will be completing their purchases using their phones.

In 2021, four out of every ten online purchases were made using smartphones.

You shouldn’t just focus on site speed. Evaluate the entirety of your site’s behavior to detect sections that need rebuilding.

Check your website analytics for places to improve

Examining your website’s performance metrics and analytics data in advance of Black Friday and Cyber Monday could yield considerable increases in your sales.

From analytical data, you can look out for:

How mobile customers use your site – and identify areas that need improving.
The path customers take from landing on your site to purchase.
If there is a specific place customers are dropping off.
How customers are responding to your promotional banners.
Their site’s navigation and how that’s performing – is it helping customers or is it distracting them, and so on.

In order to have an overview of data, like page views, sessions and more, you should take advantage of tools like Google Analytics and Hubspot Marketing Analytics, which are web analysis programs. If you would like to gain more knowledge about the particular activities done by customers on your site, you can look at tools like Mixpanel.

Now that you have finished optimizing your website, you can begin to decide what promotions and discounts you will offer for Black Friday.

Decide what your Black Friday deals/Black Friday offers will be

The discounts you offer on Black Friday will attract people to your online store. Typically, customers are expecting some exceptionally discounted deals. Therefore, you can present large savings on both freshly released items and longtime items without degrading your reputation.

Since everyone is participating in Black Friday and will be providing some kind of reward, you need to think of something unique for yours (which we will go into more detail on later).

Target the highest spenders

Be sure to tailor your Black Friday sales for the younger generation, though each store’s deal may vary.

In 2021, 45 percent of the total money spent on Black Friday belonged to Millennials. The highest selling products in both physical stores and online were electronics and sundry appliances including phones, tablets, games, and so on.

If your shop offers items that are popular among younger people, make sure to give out excellent bargains and there is a strong possibility of big profits.

Create product bundles with discounts

Black Friday is an excellent opportunity to try out different combinations of items and increase their desirability by offering a markdown. Combining items or gathering them in a package will let you benefit from your customers’ enthusiasm for a bargain and enhance your average order value.

Include special deals for regular customers

Don’t be afraid to extend bigger discounts if you have VIP customers. You can explain the one-of-a-kind nature of these offers in a message, and increase urgency by setting a deadline (e.g. “Limited Deal Available in the Next 12 Hours”).

Avoid using coupons

It will benefit you to refrain from providing discounts with promotional codes. Coupons add a further step that customers need to do, making the purchase process more drawn-out than necessary.

Delight your most loyal customers.

During this tough period for a lot of individuals, it is important to pleasantly surprise and make your customers happy, which can make a huge difference.

By improving your customer service and developing a loyalty and rewards scheme, you can demonstrate to your customers that you always strive to go above and beyond for them, even on important occasions.

Surprising customers with rewards can revitalize their enthusiasm, strengthen their loyalty and increase your sales. A fabulous method to astonish your patrons is to contact them directly.

Communicate online using SMS advertising or give personalized thank you notes to your most dedicated customers. By doing this, it will demonstrate to them that they have significance to you and that you value them, making them feel cherished and respected. Be certain to interact with customers on social media with customized private messages to those who have shared your material or appreciated your posts.

Having the capacity to interact with clients on a more individual basis can give you a benefit over large-scale retailers.

Go beyond Black Friday.

On Black Friday, shoppers anticipate obtaining impressive bargains over the extended holiday weekend. It’s essential to think about your strategy and have an advertising plan for every one of the five days of Cyber Week, like Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday.

Urge your customers to not only capitalize on your seasonal bargains, but also become a part of your active customer base. You can use ongoing email campaigns, interact on social media, and send out reminders to people who have left products in their online shopping carts.

Add a touch of personalization in everything you do.

Customizing messages that are specific to each individual customer can raise your sales, the value of the average order and your conversion rate.

Why? People want to feel special and not like they’re just another face in a crowd that has received the same message from you that you have sent to many other people. They want to know that they matter to you.

Personalization allows you to demonstrate this. Here are a few different ways you can offer a personalized experience:

Offer different deals to different customer groups (new customers versus VIP customers, for example) to tailor your messages based on buying behaviors.
On product pages, include recommendations based on what other customers bought in addition to the product the shopper is viewing.

You can create a festive atmosphere for your customers on your website homepage and a Black Friday landing page showcasing your popular items, services, and discounts to increase online sales.

Wrapping Up

Are you eagerly counting down the days until Thanksgiving and Black Friday? If so, you’re definitely not the only one. As the holidays draw closer, businesses both big and small, including Amazon, Walmart, Target and Macy’s, are preparing for the season.

By doing some proper planning, you can make sure you are ready to get new clients during the winter holidays.

People are still shopping around for bargains, and it appears that this trend will stay the same for the current year.

The only change is one that benefits you. People are increasingly turning to online shopping compared to before. Customers are trying to get the best value for their money and seeking out bargains, so if your website is configured to be easily visible when searching online, likelihood is high that they’ll find your shop.

All the odds are in your favor. If you handle the situation properly, your holiday sales could surpass your expectations.