Last Updated on by Dan S
Originally Published November 10, 2020.


How to prepare your Shopify store for Black Friday / Cyber Monday

You’re perhaps wondering what you can do this year to make your Shopify store stand out for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Well, we discuss some fantastic ideas and ways you can prepare your store.

To make the most of the year’s biggest shopping event, you’ll need to start your planning early and get ahead of your competition. With so many stores jumping on the Black Friday Cyber Monday bandwagon, you definitely won’t want to miss out yourself.

 

Create an awesome sale and offers page

 

Make it easy for visitors to see your promotions. Creating an eye-catching sales page is key to capturing consumers’ attention and drawing them to your store. Having a well-designed sales page with all the available offers and discounts on will ensure your consumers have a reason to stay on your store and purchase products. If you’re stuck for content and design ideas, take a look at what your competitors are doing, but don’t get too stuck with their designs; you’ll need to create your own to make your store different so just use competitors for ideas.

You’ll want to ensure you run your Black Friday Cyber Monday sales for a few weeks before the main event days. You want to get as much traction and as many sales as possible during this time.

Don’t price your items too low; you’ll still want to make a profit if you can! If you’re going to send more traffic to your store, you’ll want to ensure that your website can handle a surge in traffic. Luckily, for Shopify store owners, Shopify has been built to handle large spikes in website traffic and sales.

 

Use informative countdown timers

 

BFCMCountdown timers are a great way to inform your potential customers of times they need to order by and when they may receive the item(s). When they’re viewing a product on your site, you can use a countdown timer app to show under the Add to cart button. Delivery Timer offers this timer for your Shopify store. This app means that customers can see when they can expect to receive their order or when their order will be dispatched. Many stores tell their customers, ‘if they purchase before 3pm, get same-day shipping’. It gives consumers an urgency to purchase the product they were looking at.

To ensure you can keep on top of your increased orders, make sure you optimise your order and process and fulfilment. If you use a warehouse to stock your products, ensure you have them all organised in a way that makes it easy to pack and ship them. You might even consider hiring extra employees over this busy period. Talk in advance to your fulfilment warehouse and ensure they have everything in place for the spike in sales. It’s always great to be on top of things.

 

Get fantastic coupon codes in front of your customers

Social media is a great way to get your coupon and discount codes out to your customers and new consumers. Social media posts are seen by so many consumers that it proves effective to create some eye-catching posts. Be sure to include your Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday offer along with the discount code they’ll need to use.

You can look to include numerous coupons and discount codes on your website also. Movo is an app, which offers great functionality for showing many coupons. Your promotions can be displayed in a compact widget, giving you complete control over the promotions and discounts that you want to show to your customers. It’s a great way to motivate customers and get them to purchase on your store.

Also, consider a flash sales app to show your customers they are getting a really, really good deal that is just for Black Friday. What y0u should never do is hike your prices just before Black Friday to attempt to offset any discounts. This is a really shady practice, is illegal in some countries and can really damage your brand. Customers won’t return if they believe they are being cheated.

 

 

Make the most of Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are an awesome way to attract more sales to your store. You can easily segment your target audiences and create specific ad sets for each audience. What some people might find appealing, others won’t so it’s important to create different creatives for your ads.

It’s a great idea to increase your traffic around three weeks before BFCM. It’s important to target people in the weeks leading up to BFCM so when the key event days come around, your store is already in the back of their mind. Having eye-catching Facebook ads will work a treat for this.

Schedule an exciting email to your customer base

Email marketing is a great way to attract more sales, especially if the email includes an amazing deal or discount. It seems that every year, more and more people get involved with BFCM. And why wouldn’t they? Great deals and fantastic discount codes; what’s not to love? That’s why email marketing in the lead up to BFCM is so important if you want to gain extra traffic to your online store and increase your sales.

It’s all about the subject of the email you plan to send to your customer base. You need to draw them in from the start, and that means having an attractive email subject line. They’ll skip straight past it in their inbox if it doesn’t catch their eye.

Here’s a few examples that perform well:

  1. You’ve got early access to 50% off all products
  2. The Black Friday sale is coming. Be ready
  3. Can’t wait until Black Friday? Get early access now
  4. Free shipping on all orders for today only!
  5. The clock is ticking. Don’t miss out!

Fewer consumers will unsubscribe from email lists during BFCM, so it’s a great time to add an email subscribe form to your website. Point your website visitors to these and make them want to put their email address in. Give them a reason to join your mailing list; they won’t want to miss out on your BFCM emails and discounts.

If you take on board the above, then you’ll know how to prepare your store for BFCM. All these great methods will help you prepare and results in an increase in sales and traffic to your online store.

 

Create One Check Upsells for your store

With all that traffic about to hit your store on the busiest shopping day of the year, you will want to squeeze every penny out of your potential customers.

With One Check Upsells, you can sell more to same visitors. Without these in place, you are leaving easy one on the table. You can find out more about One Check Upsells here.