Elevate Black Friday and Cyber Monday Plans To The Next Level!
Tuesday, September 11, 2018Lauren Macdonald
For many merchants and online sellers, the looming rush of Black Friday/Cyber Monday can be daunting. Is your site ready for the rush? Do you have a solid returns process in place?
It’s hard to know where to begin.
I recently asked some of our fantastic eBridge Connections partners (i.e. web agencies and eCommerce solution providers) for their top Black Friday/Cyber Monday tips for merchants.
Below you will find a fantastic mix of responses/tips from some of the best in the business:
EYStudios,
Zehner,
ShipStation,
Bold Commerce, &
Jasper PIM.
Enjoy!
- Marc Darmon, Partner Manager, eBridge Connections
EYStudios
Shipping
Create a shipping calendar for the holidays that clearly communicates “order by” dates to guarantee arrival for the holidays. Not only do we recommend merchants having a holiday- specific shipping page, but also to clearly showcase your shipping calendar on your homepage, interior and checkout pages.
Making it as easy as possible for your customers to complete a transaction will not only increases conversions, but leaves the customer feeling gratified their purchase will be received in time for the holiday season.
EYStudios specializes in custom eCommerce website design, branding strategy, multi-media design, and development. Learn more about them here.
ShipStation
Offer Hassle-Free Returns
The rush of customers flooding your site during the holiday season should be exciting for you and your customers. Make their shopping experience more enjoyable by providing an exclusive, free return policy. This will serve to lessen the number of abandoned shopping carts and will consequently enhance sales. ShipStation offers a
branded returns portal to shift this unfortunate situation into a brand new sales opportunity. With customers returning to your site to submit a return, your company will have another chance to attract the customer for a different purchase.
ShipStation leads the e-commerce world with their web-based software designed to make e-commerce retailers exceptionally efficient at processing, fulfilling, and shipping their orders from all the most popular marketplaces and shopping carts using all the top carriers. Learn more on how to ease shipping and returns with ShipStation!
Zehner
Have a Customer-Centric Approach
“Maintaining a strong focus on the user experience is a key differentiator for eCommerce retailers on Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is a critical shopping event providing a valuable opportunity for brands to introduce their ethos and product offering to an influx of new customers. Dedication to information architecture strategy and experience design improves the user journey in terms of wayfinding, brand consideration and communicating key information necessary to increase conversions.” – Matthew Zehner, Founder / CEO at Zehner.
Zehner is a full-service creative digital agency specializing in eCommerce. Learn more about them here.
Bold Commerce
Optimize your Checkout
You'll see an influx of impulse buyers on BFCM, who want to order quickly and efficiently. Make sure your checkout clears the way for an easy, pain-free checkout experience. One way to ensure there are no holdups is to offer a one-page checkout and several different forms of payment, so customers can checkout the way they know and trust. Using Bold
Cashier, you have the choice of creating a sleek one-page or multipage checkout that matches your branding, offer multiple types of payment gateways, accept payment in different currencies and so much more! Get started with
Cashier today!
Bold Commerce build apps for the Shopify eCommerce platform. Their apps are designed to increase your sales and help you run your online store more efficiently so you can spend time on more important things, like growing your business. Learn more about Bold here
Jasper PIM
Ensure accurate Product Information:
“Providing accurate product information and fueling personalized shopping experiences across every store and sales channel is a huge challenge for every online merchant, especially during peak sales periods.
Product information and promotions not only have to be consistent and correct
everywhere, but it also must be catered to your target audience in order to best result in a sale.
Here is a simplified example:
A product is designated to be pushed to your USA store with geo-specific assignments including; English description, US currency, local photography, specific PDFs, and so on. However, this same product must show up on your Brazilian store with a Portuguese description, price displayed in Real, with customized creative assets, and any other supporting information that may best resonate with that target audience.
Although this geo-specific strategy is essential to success throughout the entire year, it becomes more challenging to manage during sale peaks like Black Friday. Hard sale periods are when most merchants heavily rely on attracting customers with promotions. Balancing promotional launches (e.g, web pages, banners, ads, updating product information, pricing changes, etc.) across every custom storefront and each sale channel is a tough balancing act, especially for mid-market and enterprise businesses.
In order to succeed in getting the right product information into the right channels in an efficient manner, companies are investing in Product Information Management (PIM) solutions. A PIM centralizes all product information into a single source of truth for your entire commerce technology stack and allows you to bulk update prices, change descriptions, assign inventories, schedule publications and more.
In short, a PIM is one tool that syncs each business application and streamlines back-office product management with merchandising with front-end marketing. Your entire commerce workflow will be optimized for a better ROI. “
Jasper PIM, provides a robust PIM specifically designed to address the struggles of growing mid-market and enterprise businesses. Working closely with leading brands to solve the plights hindering them from scale.
Learn more about how Jasper PIM can easily integrate with your current technology stack to empower your teams to get the most during Black Friday and every day of every year. Request a custom demo.
And there you have it!
If you need help getting your store ‘Holiday ready’, reach out to any of these amazing companies to learn more.
EYStudios
Zehner
ShipStation
Bold Commerce
Jasper PIM
Need a little help, our guide is m-packed with tips and tricks for speeding up order processing and automating data entry. It will aid your with all your integration needs for Blavk Friday and Cyber Monday.
