How to Prepare Your Ecommerce Website for the Season of Sales

Technically, Black Friday doesn’t take place until 26th November this year, and Cyber Monday three days later. However, with every year that passes, online Black Friday sales start much earlier. It is also seems to grow in popularity year on year too. 

 

So, are you ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Is your ecommerce website able to cope with the season of sales? Let’s find out. 

Here’s a few reasons why you need to get your ecommerce website ready for the Black Friday sales: 

 

● On average, people spend £346 on products on Black Friday 

● Black Friday 2020 (which was all online) generated £6 billion in sales, and it’s rising every year 

● A survey in 2019 showed that Black Friday sales were more successful for retailers than sales pre-Christmas and on Boxing Day. 

So, how do you prepare your online shop website for the sales? Well, before you do anything, you must set out your plan. There are several areas that you will need to consider: 

 

● Your Black Friday deals are going to focus on which product lines? These products will need to be in the spotlight on your website. Don’t try to spread your product offers too thinly. Focus on a few key product lines rather than your entire product list. 

● What are your sales offers? How much discount are you offering? Are you doing a combined offer? However you want to create your offers, remember you’ve still got to make a profit to ensure you don’t sacrifice your margin just to make a few more sales. 

● The level of stock you will need – do you need extra storage space? 

● Will you have enough staff available to pack and despatch orders? 

● Make sure you run marketing campaigns using social media and email. 

● Factor in delivery costs. 

Conduct a brainstorming session with colleagues to try and anticipate different scenarios and how you’d deal with them. How would you deal with selling out in the first 24 hours, what will you do if a supplier lets you down? 

 

Make sure all your site’s security certificates are up-to-date and that you have variable payment methods that also cater for international payments. Remember that Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are worldwide nowadays. If you’ve been through a Black Friday sale in the past, look back at your website analytics to get a good idea just how busy it is likely to be. 

 

Next is SEO; we can’t stress enough just how important optimising your website is for search engine ranking. As well as ensuring your website content is optimised, don’t forget your metadata, too. That means every page must have a meta description and keywords added to it so that search engines, like Google, consider your website relevant and valuable to online users. 

As well as the traditional email marketing campaigns and social media posts, there are a variety of online initiatives you can use to promote your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, including: 

 

● Google ads – create a series of online Google ads that are product specific, drawing in attention from online users searching for your type of products. 

● Facebook and Instagram ads – similar to Google ads, create a series of ads for promotion on Facebook and Instagram. Both platforms are visuals-oriented so rather than just advertising a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale, make them product-specific. 

● Google Shopping lists – Google Shopping really does attract online attention, particularly via the dedicated tab on Google’s home page. 

● Sales banners – time to get creative and develop awesome sales banners that shout out your Black Friday deals, or even countdown to the day. 

 

The aim of any Black Friday strategy is to build awareness of your deals and encourage shoppers to create their shopping list before you launch your online shopping website sales. So, use social media, email campaigns, and online advertising well in advance to build suspense and excitement around your products and deals. 

Before you head into Black Friday, you must make sure your website is technically sound. Test every page and the ordering process, and make sure the load speed of your website pages is excellent – the last thing you want is potential customers going to your competitors because your website isn’t loading quickly enough. You have just 3 seconds for your web page or product page to load and capture your visitor’s attention. 

 

Don’t get caught out on the day by your website crashing because it can’t deal with the huge rise in demand. Tools like LoadImpact.com and Blitz.io can be used to test the server load capacity of your website. If your website is struggling at peak times, think about buying additional bandwidth from your provider. 

 

Another aspect to consider is mobile devices; with as many as 72% of all online sales coming via mobile devices in 2021, you really do not want to miss out on a share of this revenue. Make sure your ecommerce website is mobile optimised and that the checkout process is quick and easy. 

 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the busiest sales periods for any ecommerce website. To make the most of this opportunity, make sure you are fully prepared. 

At it’seeze Web Design Birmingham, we offer professional ecommerce website packages that suit your business and your budget. Affordable web design in Birmingham has never been more accessible. We can analyse your current website and work out what areas could be improved and build a website that works for you and your business. Call us today to create an enviable ecommerce website.