Black Friday has rapidly developed from being just another event to one of the biggest shopping events of the year, for both consumers and businesses.
For consumers, it’s a good excuse to buy the most desired products at better prices, and for businesses, it’s a great opportunity to increase the sales. Here you are, in the middle of the action, and the Black Friday frenzy starts!
If you are a consumer, you already know tips and tricks on how to prepare for Black Friday like a pro. Make a budget, decide how much you can afford to spend, make lists, track the best deals, save your favourite products in wish lists and keep an eye on the start of the campaigns. Yeah, we know them too and we, as customers, are getting better and better at buying stuff with discounts, whether we need those products, or we buy under the impulse of the black holiday.
But, if you are a shop owner, a development agency, an e-commerce consultant, a project manager or a web developer, you know exactly why Black Friday is called black. And we’re not talking about the history of the event. With each year, you get through several emotional stages, from excitement to panic attacks, when organising the campaigns.
If you are in this category, we feel you, brothers! We know every challenge and the taste of 4 am coffee. But still, we know that feeling of pure relief, at the end of the campaign, and what we enjoy the most, the good feedback from our clients.
We have good news for you: there is life after Black Friday!
The clock is ticking, and many of you are making the last adjustments before you launch the campaign. Here are our last minute Black Friday tips and tricks:
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Make the last check-ups
Test everything. Check if your code is optimised and make sure that the infrastructure is adapted to handle the increased traffic. You also need to check the products prices to make sure that there are no errors after the latest modifications on the platform. You may have heard stories about products sold at 1$, instead of 1000$.
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Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst
Every Black Friday is different, and you need to prepare for everything. We know all the horror stories that can appear and trust us, they are real! You may have problems with your database, with your payment provider or maybe your ERP will not handle the traffic.
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Make sure everyone knows what to do
When things go wrong, it’s nice to have the certainty that everyone knows what to do. Make procedures for every possible situation, and delegate people to handle them.
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Resolve everything as soon as possible
Most of Black Friday campaigns last from 1 day up to 2-3 days, so is critical for you to make sure that everything will work as expected during the black sales. It would be unpleasant to have your website down for hours. Not to mention that you will lose sales and your brand image will be affected too.
Make sure everybody will be available before launching the campaign and during the campaign and maintain a close connection with all your providers and key collaborators.
5. Stick together with your team
Let’s keep it real. Organising Black Friday campaigns means extra effort for the entire team and everyone involved. We all know that a great engine is the one that does not break at over 110% workload, so make sure that your team engine can handle even 120%, with any support from anyone in the team.
Having those in mind, good luck and we hope you’ll get the most out from this Black Friday. After that, you’ll have a short moment to catch your breath, and then Christmas campaigns will knock on your door.
If your campaigns were a success, congrats, and enjoy the results! If not, transform every experience into lessons learned and make sure that next year you’ll plan and implement even better!
Good luck to all of you!
