It’s that time of the year again - Black Friday and Cyber Monday are almost upon us.
Survive and Thrive - How to Avoid the Black Friday and Cyber Monday eCommerce Crash
Along with the weekend between them, this period can make or break an eCommerce business. Collectively known as BFCM, these couple of days are (in)famous for good reason.
An insane amount of sales and revenue is generated during this period - platforms and brick-and-mortar stores alike. However, this takes a toll on the infrastructure and logistics of your stores - online and otherwise.
The influx of online and physical traffic can overwhelm your employees and your websites. In this article, we'll be showing how you can not only survive this period but actually thrive with the implementation of good practices and the assistance of Bee IT.
Black Friday vs. Cyber Monday
As you may well know, Black Friday is the first Friday after Thanksgiving, while Cyber Monday is, you guessed it, the first Monday.
Traditionally, Black Friday, a term that has been around since the fifties, relates to brick-and-mortar stores and sales. Cyber Monday, which came about with the rise of online stores in the early aughts, refers to online sales.
The reason we are mentioning both in an article that deals with eCommerce is that online sales have been a significant part of BF sales for some time now. Disregarding one and focusing only on CM leaves you with incomplete information and poor advice.
If you were forced to choose only one, you should focus your energy on Cyber Monday. Since you're most likely not in such a precarious position, try to implement the advice and techniques below for the entire BFCM period, just remember to keep things right.
Crash and Burn
Have you ever seen one of those Black Friday videos (or have seen this in person), where people come in droves into stores? The employees are overwhelmed, people are borderline fighting over products, the building itself looks like it's going to explode.
Well, a similar thing happens to your eCommerce websites and stores.
An intense influx of site traffic can overwhelm your servers. People looking for the best deals, laser-focused on discounts and online coupons, might be too much. Your customer service department can be just as overwhelmed. Handling too many requests at once, answering too many questions, customers won't get the service they expect.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are short periods of time when people are ready to spend a lot of money. If you don't prepare your websites properly, not only will you miss out on a golden opportunity that only comes once a year, you might even make less money than usual.
You not only want to have stable customer support and website infrastructure, but you also want to provide customers with the best user experience possible.
Not being prepared for BFCM means:
- You will lose out on potential profits.
- You will damage your reputation and brand.
Both of these are obvious. Instead of capitalizing on an intense surge of traffic, you crash and don’t make the most of it. Furthermore, a poor showing during this period means people will be less likely to shop from you in the future.
Surviving and Thriving, With Bee IT
Of course, BFCM isn’t only about surviving, you also need to provide people with the best experience possible. You want to have a layout that makes navigation easy and intuitive. Checkouts need to be quick and safe, shopping carts have to be easy to find.
This is where Bee IT comes in.
A company dedicated to e-commerce services and solutions, Bee IT utilizes powerful Salesforce and Magento technologies that provide stability, safety, and a great UX experience for your customers.
How Bee IT Can Help
Bee IT has the right tools, and the proper expertise, to help your eCommerce store power through BFCM and any other challenge and opportunity that comes your way.
Through their years of experience as certified Magento consultants and developers, as well as through their implementation of Salesforce technology, Bee IT can help you by:
- Providing you with an easy-to-navigate and user-friendly platform
- Facilitating a fast and stable website
- Giving you 24/7 Customer support
- Having a thorough understanding of what makes eCommerce tick, through years of experience
Actionable Steps
Below are steps you can take to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and ways Bee IT’s technology and expertise can help you.
Prepare Thorough Data
Saying information is more valuable than gold is pretty much a cliché nowadays. Still, it's a cliché for a reason. Understanding your audience, what they want and need, is vital for eCommerce success. It allows you to personalize your content, provide recommendations and product suggestions, further pushing sales.
Bee IT uses the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform. Utilizing its Einstein AI tech, it helps you gather and keep customer data in the cloud. This information on customer behavior can be shared with team members and utilized through further customizing the shopping experience.
A personalized and streamlined experience during BFCM leaves less room for error, makes for a better UX, and can provide people with shopping suggestions that they wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise.
The Einstein Artificial Intelligence technology can provide insights and predictions about the future behavior of customers. You can provide a much better experience for regular customers who are going to check out your store during BFCM.
Focus on Scalability and Management
You need to scale easily, to adapt to the impending growth and user influx. And of course, things need to be organized properly in order to make the most out of your sales. People need to find what they want and need quickly and easily.
With Magento 2 technology, Bee IT helps keep things organized, and scalable. Its catalog-management tools allow you to easily set up the products you're selling on your website.
Furthermore, you can prep your eCommerce store for BFCM a lot better through the maintenance and support services Bee IT offers. They can help with your website’s multi-device compatibility, so you won't miss out on users who prefer to shop through devices you have not been optimized for before.
Magento tech gives you complete control over the content found on your site. Furthermore, Bee IT can help you prepare for BFCM through their eCommerce application QA testing, giving you extra confidence in the stability of your eCommerce store.
Bee IT uses scale-up servers that add more memory and processing power when needed. Through these actions, it increases its workload capacity, allowing your servers to handle any serious upticks in traffic.
The Importance of Functionality, Stability, and 24/7 Support
Since the greatest danger of the BFCM period is becoming overwhelmed and losing website stability, you should invest in extra support. Your platform’s code needs to be clean, you should (be able to) test things out in preparation for a busy period at all times.
In this case, Bee IT offers 24/7 support, as well as maintenance services per request. If you get into trouble, you can count on getting proper assistance.
Furthermore, Magento 2 has its own integrated automated testing capabilities, as well as a clean codebase with enhanced caching.
Provide the Best User Experience Possible
If you want to make sales and keep people as returning customers, you want to provide them with a good shopping experience. We already mentioned catalogs and website stability, but that's only part of good UX design. You want people to easily navigate your website.
Every extra step a user needs to take to make a purchase lowers the chances of that sale occurring.
Platforms like Magento 2 allow for an improved user interface and make checkout simple and quick.
One of the more annoying things customers face is slow loading times. This can be exacerbated when servers are working as intensely as they do during BFCM. A good platform can circumvent these issues.
Bee IT’s Magento 2 reports 50% faster page loading times, making life that much easier.
Furthermore, Bee IT makes CloudFlare’s CDNs a vital part of prepping any site. Without going into too much technical detail, Bee IT’s experts implement CloudFlare’s edge servers to speed up page loading times. These work by offloading a great deal of static and cached content found on your main server.
Trust and Security across All Devices
During the madness of BFCM, a customer will still want to shop from a place it trusts. You need to be certain that you are using platforms that provide secure payment options, through any device they use.
Bee IT developers have years of experience with Salesforce, which can provide just that. It allows for trusted and safe integration with leading mobile payment companies, allowing people to make a purchase safely from their phones.
Conclusion
Don't let yourself become overwhelmed during the holidays. This is the time of year when you can make amazing profits and really show people what your company is made of. Failing, however, means damaging your reputation and missing out on substantial sales.
Utilize Bee IT’s services and tech before, and during, BFCM, and you'll see remarkable results. You count on their 24/7 customer support, as well as the stability, speed, and UX friendliness provided by their Salesforce and Magento technologies.