Prepare for BFCM

BFCM (Black Friday, Cyber Monday) is a great opportunity to get several times more revenue in a day, promote your store and expand one customer base. BFCM is one of the biggest events of the year for online businesses around the world. In this article, we will talk about how to prepare your online store for the sales season.

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Assumptions for 2022 

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Peak season is beginning earlier and lasting longer than ever:

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• Early bird shopping – online sales that occurred during the first week of November – increased by 16% last year.

• In 2021, 23% of Holiday sales took place in the final two weeks of the year, an increase of 11% YoY.

• Shopping grew by 18% worldwide during the 2 weeks leading up to December 25th, and by 16% during Boxing. Week – the biggest digital growth across the entire season.

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Inflation will be a concern for many consumers going into the 2022 holiday season.

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• Although fewer items are anticipated to be purchased at the checkout and fewer discounts are anticipated, overall online sales are anticipated to increase.

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Key findings from 2021 

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• Businesses that had a successful BFCM or Holiday sale started their planning sooner and did it in greater detail.

• Large to medium-sized firms ($1M+) began planning three to four months before Black Friday, compared to just one to two months for half of the surveyed retailers.

• Most people concentrated their planning efforts on their pricing and promotion strategies, next on their marketing strategies, and finally on the planning of their eCommerce platforms.

• There is a significant association between adopting social media in BFCM strategy and smaller firms ($20K-$100K). Analytics are used significantly more frequently to inform strategy in larger firms ($1M+).

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The top 3 challenges merchants faced when planning \ sales/pricing promotions for BFCM were:

1. Establishing fair sale pricing

2. Determining the goods that will be in the greatest demand

3. Doubts about the volume of the product they would sell

• Businesses were more likely to report that BFCM 2021 met their goals than fell short despite customer fears and supply chain challenges.

• The techniques to boost visitors to a store and suggestions for discounts and promotions are what merchants are most interested in.

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Promotional strategies for merchants

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Checkout extensibility 

By enabling checkout extensibility, partners can create checkout customizations for Plus businesses and distribute them via a private or public app on the Shopify App Store. With the aid of checkout UI extensions, retailers can integrate promotions right into their checkout process. For instance, if a customer didn't take advantage of promotion earlier in the customer journey, they may be presented with another promotion (such as 50% off product X) later on in the checkout process. The release of this feature is scheduled for the end of September 2022.

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Daily online offers

One of the most difficult components of a prolonged BFCM campaign is maintaining momentum. By marketing a different offer every day during peak season, retailers can keep customers coming back. Since each day provides new material and a limited-time offer, this type of promotion offers an opportunity to focus on specific client segments and may increase email open rates.

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Timed discounting

By scheduling discounts during a specific window, you may introduce scarcity and gamification. For instance, the discount might be 25% for the first hour of the sale before dropping by 1% per hour for 24 hours. Since there is a wait of five minutes between occurrences in Launchpad, this must be done manually.

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In conclusion

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So, there is a lot of money to be made during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, that's clear. If you are the owner of your online store, you should prepare the business to attract as many buyers as possible during the BFCM period.

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