Black Friday - the biggest shopping days of the year is coming. Not only in the store, but now this craze has entered the e-commerce to form a whole weekend of sales ending on Cyber Monday (CM). For the coming BFCM, still, there’s enough time to prepare your store to grab attention to increase sales and traffic.

With the current pace of technology, BFCM is not just an event for the big players, there is an enormous data to support the businesses of any size can take advantage of this event. And, you can take part without crossing your margins.

Running a successful BFCM sale is really stressful for many retailers as they want a massive influx of traffic and sales during this holiday season. Look at the insights of the influx of shoppers coming to the platform over the past years to make it effortless for you and make sure this year's holiday is a successful one for your business.

Go through the checklist to make sure your store is in the best position possible to not only succeed and make more sales during the holiday season, but also turn down the stress and headaches this season brings to a lot of retailers. This list will also help you cover all of your bases and give you ideas on preparing and running your holiday sale this year. Let's get into it:

Gather past BFCM sales data

Analyse previous BFCM sale data to get a better understanding into what you can expect. By comparing traffic and revenue from previous years, you can spot trends and strategize marketing tactics. It’s never too late to start preparing your front end site and backend management. With year-on-year analysis set your predictions and accordingly ensure greater redundancy in your infrastructure in preparation for the high volume of traffic. Individual retailers can also adjust their sites and potentially increase revenue by using past data. Instead of rushing at the last minute, be ready with a planned marketing strategy for this year BFCM sales.

Make sure your site can handle it

Get an idea of how much traffic you can expect from the previous year sales, respectively make sure your site speed is performing at its peak on BFCM weekend. A crawling site or the one that encounters downtime is a significant reason for customers to abandon their shopping cart, which can seriously affect your sales. Sometimes, too much concurrent traffic to your site can bog it down and potentially crash your site. So it’s a good idea to test your server load capacity frequently before the weekend, checking site speed ready to handle the spike in traffic.

Grab the attention

In the weeks leading up to BFCM sale, start driving suspense and buzz through as many channels as possible to make it a bigger success.Use email and social media campaigns of what’s to come, post sneak-peeks of upcoming offers, and start earning the curiosity of your customers to emphasize the “amazing offers” you’ll have that weekend. This is the best way to grab the attention of your existing customers as well as spark interest from new ones.

Just remember that offers can get more traffic and sales during the competitive holiday season. This means you may need to increase the visibility of your ads with amazing offers to attract your targeted customers during BFCM sales. When customers do enter your site ready for the sales, make sure you’ve created a dedicated landing page for your BFCM sale. A page they can easily reach through clear instructions or a banner on the homepage.

Pay attention to service

An increase in customer queries is potentially expected in this holidays, so it’s critical to respond quickly as part of providing a seamless customer experience, even during this busy time. The other part is being pleasant and respectful, even to rude and impatient customers.

Prepare for an influx of emails and calls during this weekend and adjust your customer service capacity accordingly. If you have the resources, consider implementing Live Chat onto your site for faster responses. Also, refresh your knowledge on offering high-quality customer service practices to minimize the need for interaction by delivering customers with the answers before they inquire. Turn one-time shoppers into year-round customers with a memorable BFCM shopping experience of this year.

Delivery and returns

Be the online marketer who cares and goes above and beyond the call of duty for their customers. Surging online orders around this time is going to put a stress on retailer fulfillment and added pressure on shipping companies. If this results in any increases shipping rate or delivery time, make sure you’re transparent to your customers. If you’re keeping them the same or offering quicker, cheaper delivery, make sure you’ve got enough staff in your dispatch team to manage with the rise in orders.

The same idea goes for returns. Offer a seamless shopping experience with hassle-free returns option that gives peace of mind to them. Plus, it might just get that on-the-fence about to shop since you're showing confidence in your product and undertaking the risk from the customer. People will be spending more frivolously during this weekend, so be prepared for a potential spike in returns.

Prepare for the hit before Friday

You’ll be advertising this sale for weeks leading up to it. So although you’re likely to see the majority of your sessions occur during the weekend, you should be prepared for the influx of traffic to begin even earlier. You should do a proper ecommerce website maintenance & set up discounts and other page content before the Black Friday weekend. Having this prepared will get you ready for eager shoppers entering your site.