Getting Your E-Commerce Store Prepared For Black Friday and Cyber Monday

We are a few weeks away from the biggest shopping season of the year – Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which both occur in November every year. It is the biggest shopping season because buyers are usually more than happy to buy every product they see on the bonanza list. This shows that buyers are ready to spend more money on products if there are discounts. Every year it keeps getting better, 2017 recorded more sales than 2016 and 2018 recorded more sales than 2017. We expect that the 2019 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales will exceed that of 2018.
Interestingly, e-commerce stores have taken over Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping. Last year, e-commerce shopping broke a new record by taking the bigger share of the season’s shopping thereby overtaking brick and mortar stores. Not to mention that last year 2018, also recorded the biggest Black Friday and Cyber Monday online shopping in history. In the US alone, online sales rose up to $7.9 billion.
If this doesn’t tell you that this is the time for e-commerce store owners to make the most of, then you need to start reading from the beginning again.

What Are The Steps To Take In Preparation

So, online shopping is now the preferred shopping for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, for obvious reasons such as less hustle for products. However, this doesn’t automatically guarantee that every online store will benefit from the shopping frenzy. You should note that most online stores started preparations for black Friday and Cyber Monday as early as October 1st. Who knows how much preparation big online stores put into this season every year? Hence, if you want to get the best out of it and thrive during the competitive season, best to prepare ahead.

Analyse Previous Year’s Sales

The first thing you should do in preparation for the biggest shopping season of the year is to look back. Find out what products sold the most, analyse in context. What products sold the most generally, as you know some products sell better than others. What products sold the most in your e-commerce niche? Answering these questions will help with your preparation. Analyse the data against buyers demography. Then analyse your sales for the last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, find out which of your products sold well during the season. The information gathered from the analyses will help you when stocking up inventory for the season.

Prepare For Traffic Influx

Many big sites have suffered from the upsurge in traffic during Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the previous years. It can be so devastating that an e-commerce site affected by the high amount of traffic may not be available up until after Thanksgiving, thereby losing money.
To prevent this, ensure to confirm from your server provider whether your server facilities can handle the high traffic. You can rent more server space ahead to deal with the traffic. Another way is to use Content Delivery Network (CDN). You not only want to prevent your ecommerce from crashing but also improve your website speed despite the traffic influx.

Improve Your Ecommerce Site’s UX For Better Shopping Experience

Make it easy for browsers to convert into buyers. Navigation should be clear and straightforward, and your site’s design should be simple. Adopt cross-selling and up-selling – as potential buyers are browsing your site, your site should have a suggest feature that will show products that will complement products potential buyers are interested in. You can also offer bundle selling whereby you sell different related products together as a package at a discounted price that is cheaper than if they buy each item individually. You want to make sure that buyers who come to your site don’t leave to go find other products they need to buy, instead they buy everything they need on your store.
Another way to improve the shopping experience for potential buyers is by creating landing pages exclusively for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Don’t forget the importance of countdown banners and discounts banners, they usually help buyers to make quick decisions. The fear of missing out often convert browsers to buyers.
The important thing is to make sure that potential buyers see the deals you’re offering immediately they visit your site.

Ensure That Your Ecommerce Store is Mobile Friendly

As an e-commerce store owner, this should already be a rule you live by but if you’re still behind on mobile responsiveness for your site, now is the time to get with the trend. Mobile devices accounted for 40% of all the sales during the 2018 Black Friday. So, you see, you have no excuse to ignore mobile responsiveness for your e-commerce store.
A lot of big e-commerce stores have mobile apps and this generally makes it easier for mobile shoppers. However, that’s not the only way, you too can compete for mobile shoppers by making your site mobile responsive. You will need the help of an expert to do this. Your site needs to be optimized in such a way that the experience mobile shoppers get is similar to the experience desktop shoppers get when visiting your e-commerce store. Your site should be fast – mobile shoppers are even more impatient than desktop shoppers. Ensure that navigation is seamless, and don’t over your e-commerce site with unnecessary pop-ups and auto-play videos.

Bottom line

Every day is an opportunity for you to convert your site’s visitors to regular customers. Black Friday and Cyber Monday create an even better opportunity for you to get more customers. The plan is simple; create an interaction plan making use of your live chat, chatbot or/and popup feature or whatever works to ask visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. The best way to do this to get the desired result is by offering freebies or discounts. Buyers are already in the mood for deals, benefitting from another one won’t hurt anyone. So, seize the opportunity, offer future deals, ask them to subscribe to your exclusive newsletter to be the first to get great deals.