The 5 Essential Last-Minute Steps for a Successful Black Friday

It’s one of the biggest e-commerce days of the year, and it’s in less than 48 hours! With the current COVID-19 restrictions, more people than ever are shopping online this year, so it’s crucial to ensure your site is prepared.

Make sure your hosting provider knows about your plans

This is the most important one. It’s absolutely crucial to let your hosting provider know what your plans are for Black Friday if you are expecting an increase in traffic. If you have any forecasts for expected traffic, you should share this with them so that they may make any preparations their side to assist in the smooth delivery of your website to it’s extra customers. Whatever sort of package you have with your current host, whether large or small, they should still be more than happy to discuss the current capabilities and limits of your setup so that you can have a realistic expectation of performance on the day, or perhaps add more resources if possible. Which, in turn, leads us on to:

Make sure your hosting setup can stack up to your expected traffic

You may want to speak to your hosting provider about not only whether or not your resources can handle your expected traffic, but also whether your actual type of setup will. If you’ve planned your Black Friday campaign well and spent money on it, the last thing you want is for that to go to waste because your website crashed under the strain of it! Speak to your hosting provider. They may be able to advise you or run some tests on your hosting capabilities.

Have a Backup plan

Sometimes, we can cover every fathomable base in the preparation stages and something will still go wrong. The important thing is not to just cross your fingers and hope it won’t happen. You need to accept it as a possibility and make sure you have a plan in place so that you and your staff can approach any hiccups calmly and quickly. Make sure your backups are running up to date and that you have the very latest server and security updates installed and running.

Keep in touch with your customers

Make sure all of your customer communication channels are working as they ought to. These will be crucial for keeping customer up to date with offers, an increased demand on orders and, if the worst should happen, abreast of any issues and timescales related to them. Make sure you have a company Twitter account, as this is a great platform to use to keep your customers aware of any ongoing issues, and to quickly respond to any customers experiencing common issues. Make sure you have an excellent method for keeping customers up to date about their ongoing orders too, as this will be crucial to keeping your customers happy as the order amounts increase.

Let your customers know what’s coming!

Use the next few days to let your customers know you’re taking part in the Black Friday sales. Make sure you use your site, social media accounts and newsletter capabilities over the next few days to really get your customers interested in what you will be offering.

We hope that whatever your business is planning for Black Friday that it is a success. Planning for the event and making sure your site is robust enough to cope is key. If you need any assistance, or you would like to speak to a hosting specialist about your current solution and your Black Friday plans, get in touch with us today.