Black Friday falls on the 29th this year, so we are just under a fortnight out. It is an odd import to watch take hold. A few years ago it barely registered here as anything more than American news footage of people fighting over televisions. Now the big online retailers are pushing it hard in the UK, the emails have already started, and shoppers have learned to expect a discount at the end of November whether the shop wanted to give one or not.
Whatever you think of that, it is happening, and if you sell online you have a decision to make and not much time to make it in.
The first question is whether to take part at all. There is a real cost to discounting, and for some brands, particularly at the premium end, a Black Friday sale trains customers to wait and cheapens the proposition. That is a legitimate position. If you go that way, though, decide it deliberately rather than by drifting into it, and have an answer ready for the customers who ask why you are not joining in.
If you are taking part, the boring operational stuff is what will actually make or break the day, and it is what tends to get left too late.
- Make sure the site can take the traffic. A spike that would be a good problem on a normal day can put the site over if nobody has checked. Talk to whoever hosts it now, not on the 28th.
- Get the tracking straight before, not after. There is nothing worse than a big day where the analytics were broken and you cannot tell afterwards what worked. Test that your ecommerce tracking is firing and that a test purchase records properly.
- Sort the mobile experience. More of your traffic is on phones every year, and a checkout that is fiddly on a small screen loses you sales you paid to attract.
- Line up the email. Your existing list is the cheapest and most responsive audience you have. Have the sends planned and written now so you are not scrambling on the day.
- Check stock and fulfilment. Selling something you cannot ship on time turns a good day into a pile of refunds and angry emails in December.
The other thing I would think about is what happens after the discount ends. A Black Friday deal brings in a wave of first-time buyers, most of whom will vanish unless you have a plan to bring them back at full price later. Capturing the email at checkout and having a sensible follow-up ready matters more than the size of the discount, because the discount is a one-off and the relationship is where the money is over a year.
There is still time to get most of this in order, but not much. If you have not started, the next few days are the ones that count.
