Black Friday: How your business can prepare for the biggest one yet

Remember when Black Friday was just a day? Well, that’s all changed now. 

Many retailers will be preparing early Black Friday deals, giving the entire month of November the Black Friday treatment. 

The rise of online shopping means its easier than ever to get customers to come to you, but you’ll need to get creative with how to connect keen sales shoppers with your discounted merchandise to keep your profits up and your customers engaged. 

Taking an e-commerce approach and selling your products online (if you’re not already) is just one way to benefit from the Black Friday phenomenon. 

This article will address the core areas of consideration for your retail business if you’re looking to win big during this busy selling season. 

Explore where you can leverage technology to create bandwidth and make Black Friday frictionless and profitable. 

Here’s what we cover in this article: 

Black Friday finances 

First thing’s first. If your business runs a fine line between profit and loss in its day-to-day operations, you need to decide if running Black Friday sales is the right move.  

Examine your financial health, via profit and loss statements. Run some projections to find out if your business model can really support not only item price cuts, but the temporary expansion of staff and expenses, such as increased marketing or advertising budgets, you might need to accommodate this potential demand.  

Does it make sense to hire additional customer service contractors to deal with an increase in order enquiries? If stock sells out, will you need extra warehouse staff on hand to pick and pack? Are there any issues in your supply chain that would prevent items getting to the customers on time? 

Aside from these logistical and financial considerations, you should also make sure you’ve got the ability to capture the right data from this event. Understanding your customers’ buying patterns, locations, and reach potential is an essential part of growing the business and making the following year even better. 

Getting the right financial, inventory, and supply chain software can help manage insight for you, rather than manually collating various spreadsheets of customer and stock data yourself. 

Assessing shopper behaviour for stock management 

You will need to stock up for elevated sales, whether that’s in stores or online. That means more stock needs to be warehoused, or transported, and that comes with a cost. 

Look at your data from last year to gauge how much inventory you need to both in-store and online. Did you have any surprises in the stock you thought was going to sell well and didn’t or the reverse? 

Investing in stock insight is important for creating the capacity needed to manage high demand during peak trading season. 

You can ensure you have enough inventory for the influx in demand during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and well into the Christmas shopping season. 

Accepting payments for Black Friday sales 

Without a secure, fast payment system, your Black Friday gains will be limited. Generational preferences and how comfortable shoppers are with payment technology will also factor greatly into your success. 

Today’s customer journeys are increasingly varied, and can be immediate or extremely complex, especially for the younger or oldest demographic. Setting up a fluid payment system via social media is essential in our modern, connected work. Some social media platforms can take you to your purchase page immediately, while others risk dropping the customer via a series of convoluted steps.  

Journeys can range from impulse purchases on shopping or social media apps to lengthier, highly considered purchases involving multiple channels for product research and price comparison—even during Black Friday sales. 

Consider weaving accessibility into your purchase journey. Ensuring your website meets accessibility standards, and is mobile-friendly, for example, can increase customer trust in the payment system. Demand for mobile payments and digital wallets is growing, so it’s worth exploring these as part of your payment methods. 

Integrate the payment process into your omnichannel customer offering for a frictionless Black Friday experience. 

To do so, you should consider the customer’s expectations at each point in their journey and ensure your payment technology can accommodate any scenario of sale regardless of channel or preferred payment method. 

Retailers of any size will stand out by offering simplicity, convenience, and durable, well-defined value in their approach to payments. 

For online retailers, a diverse offering of payment methods is critical to customer experience. 

We know from research over the years that consumers generally can be up to four times more likely to complete a purchase if they see a wide variety of payment types presented to them at checkout. 

Managing payments security during increased traffic 

You should also consider the security of your customers’ financial and personal data, and factor in protection against fraud. 

In 2018, the EU passed a new framework, commonly known as GDPR mandating secure storage of customer’s data. If you trade with any customers in EU countries, and hold their data, you must comply with the terms of this requirement.  

While existing businesses have been compliant since the change, if you’re starting a new business to take advantage of Black Friday sales, you should factor in additional technology costs of this into your plan and budget. 

More innovation that supports improved customer data protection is tokenisation, which allows safe storage of your unique card details providing access to the original payment information regardless of the contact point. 

Shoppers have grown more willing to use new payment technology, but they’re still concerned about the safety of their personal information. 

Research shows 62% are generally welcoming towards added authentication measures for online payment security as mandated by PSD2. 

New authentication technologies will revalidate repeat purchases or return shoppers to the website and make their experience even more frictionless. 

Hiring Black Friday staff 

Even with everything else in place, you’ll still need to ensure you have enough staff coverage to deal with stock management and preparing items for delivery. 

Insights from a business management solution can tell you how many additional staff you’ll need to hire. It can also help you with hiring, and onboarding and managing schedules. 

Adding more staff—temporary or full time—means more payroll admin of assigning employee types and calculating accurate pay and benefits for each. 

Doing this accurately will be more challenging during the busy Black Friday season, especially if it’s done manually. 

Payroll integration technology with time tracking and attendance functionality can make peak season staffing easier. 

Connecting your time and sales data is important for reconciliation purposes, eliminating data errors, and reducing payroll fraud. 

Keeping track of this data can also help with planning for other peak trading seasons. 

A business management solution equipped with automation can make this easy and error-free for any size staff. 

Final thoughts on preparing for Black Friday 

Black Friday is a fast-paced selling season. Even more so now than ever, if your customer doesn’t get the experience they expect, you might lose a future sales opportunity. 

Utilise new technology for business management to stay on top of cash flow and ensure whatever they buy, gets to them quickly. With careful inventory and stock management, staffing decisions, reporting, and the right marketing approach, you’ll keep things running smoothly at the online checkout for one of the biggest shopping events of the year. 

Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2019 and has been updated for relevance.