Black Friday (2)

Here’s what to do and remember:

• Choose your promotions

The first thing to do is to choose the deals and promotions you intend to offer. As we’ve mentioned before, don’t just choose anything, research and look at your sales records to see which lines are popular and which goods could be more popular at a discounted rate

• Make sure you have enough stock

With the above comes checking that you’ve got enough stock to handle the larger amount of orders, especially on the items you expect to sell in greater numbers.

• Decide on a timescale

In our fourth post we discussed the different ways that different companies promote their Black Friday deals; this can range from just having sales on the day, to offering a deal each day in the week leading up to it. What you need to do is choose the option that best suits your business, in other words what you can realistically manage.

• Have enough staff available

A huge part of the management of the day is having enough staff available. Put on extra shifts for staff, temporarily hire more delivery drivers, or you can simply rope in friends and family to help you out if your operations are relatively small.

• Use external help if necessary

We’ve also looked at what delivery expectations customers might have with their deals and a great way to help ensure you keep on top of this is to use an external delivery company. By passing the responsibility on to experts like us, you can just focus on dealing with the other challenges Black Friday throws at you.

• Assess your company website

Another key thing to remember is your online presence – particularly e-commerce businesses. Make sure you promote your deals online and that your website can handle the increased volume of traffic. Otherwise it could be slow – or worse crash – leaving customers disgruntled and you out of pocket.

• Adapt your site if necessary

We also discussed ways to help with the above point in our third post. Here we explained how you can edit and change the settings on your site to help accommodate more visitors. We also advised on how you can retarget those who visit your site for a potential sale at a later date.

• Keep on top of customer queries

A very important tip is to ensure you handle your customer queries during this time to again avoid any disgruntled customers – after all you want them to keep coming back after Black Friday.

• Don’t forget your other customers

Additionally to point out, you also need to remember you will still have customers shopping at your store or online for non-Black Friday related reasons. These people need to experience the same quality service as anyone else, as again you want to ensure they return to shop with you.

• Don’t promise something you can’t deliver

Lastly, one significant point we covered was to be completely sure you can offer what you advertise. This covers everything from the offers you have to your deliver rates and response times. If not you risk receiving damaging negative feedback and loss of clients!

So, as we get ever closer to the Black Friday sales, following this checklist and of course reading our other useful posts.will get your business on to the right path for selling success. All that’s left to do now then is get started today on getting ready for the start of the festive buying period. Good luck!