Tricks and Treats for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Beyond PART 1

September 23rd, 2019 was officially the first day of Fall- even though it feels like a second summer in Texas- and as of today, we are now in October. What does this mean? For most, it means pumpkin spice lattes, warm clothes, cold weather, and Halloween. For you and your business, it means that Black Friday is under 60 days away which a fright in its own right, but the good news is it does not have to be.

To help you get prepped, we are launching a series of posts with all of our Favorite Tricks and Treats for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. We are kicking it off now with our Number 1 Trick and our Number 1 Treat.

The best source of data you will ever be able to find and use for Black Friday is going to come from your reports from your past Black Fridays.

You want to be as prepared as possible and make sure that you do not run out of inventory and also make sure you optimize the deals you offer to fit your needs. You can use your current stock count to tell you which items you need to reorder or which items you might want to push and feature.

Our Insights>Reports page is going to be crucial for you to use for decisions when it comes to your inventory.

Reports I recommend pulling:

From the Insights Product Reports

-Item demand summary for at least last year's Black Friday (if Available). If you have not been using ShipStation that long then you might want to focus instead on the date range you have available. This report is going to tell you what items are most purchased and in demand.

Product Sales Report and Returned Products Report. You will want to use these two reports in conjunction with each other to get an actual idea of sales with returned items factored in.

From the Insights Inventory Reports

Inventory out of stock shipments report. This tells you what you ran out of stock of last year so you can be prepped and ready to either order more based on demand or work on advertising your limited supply to drive traffic and purchases.

From the Insights Raw Data Exports

Raw data customer export. You want to make sure you see who your customers were last year so you can market to them, send emails, and offer incentives for repeat purchases.

Finally, if you are looking for data that you are not finding above you might want to consult our Custom Reports Guide to see what kind of custom reports you can create and what data you can pull.

https://www.shipstation.com/blog/black-friday-marketing/

https://www.shipstation.com/blog/tag/black-friday/

https://www.shipstation.com/blog/tag/cyber-monday/

https://www.shipstation.com/blog/5-returns-strategies-that-can-win-holiday-shoppers/

-Erin: Your Friendly ShipStation Community Moderator

Ready for Part 2? Check it out below.

Tricks and Treats for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Beyond PART 2

Official comment

Erin E.

October 24, 2019 21:12
Edited

Hi Pierre,

You are so welcome and I so happy this helped you out. I know that you are a Black Friday Pro yourself, do you have any tips or tricks for our Community going into the Holiday Season?

Also, keep your eyes out as I will be posting the final part of the series tomorrow. In the meantime, you can check out part using the link below

I hope you have an amazing day yourself!

-Erin

Pierre Gagnon - Logistics

October 23, 2019 14:55

Thanks Erin for the reports suggestions. I'm pulling reports right now and compiling data to make sure we have enough stock for everyone.

Have a wonderful day !

October 25, 2019 13:03

Sure why not. It's not exactly about Black Friday, more about respecting the shipping deadlines for the holiday season.

For this trick we use a Canada Post grid (called the Delivery Standards) that lists the guaranteed shipping delays to every postal code in Canada. https://www.canadapost.ca/tools/pg/manual/PGdeliverystds-e.pdf

We also use a set of Wikipedia pages that list all Canadian postal codes prefixes : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes_of_Canada:_H

With that, we build automation rules to apply tags (ex : ABSOLUTE DEADLINE DECEMBER 12TH) to every order based on the postal code prefixes, according to the specific shipping delay for that specific location.

Obviously there can be shipping delays out of our control that could prevent the orders from reaching the customers right on time, so we try to always ship BEFORE that absolute deadline. Still it does help up sort of prioritize the orders, not just based on the order age, but by the actual urgency of the order. This ensures smooth and consistent shipping expectations for all of our customers during the Holiday season.