Black Friday Ecommerce Guide: 10 Steps For More Sales in 2023

The biggest nightmare for any site owner is your website breaking down just as you get a surge in customers looking to buy.

It’s enough to make you wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats. Downtime on a website is like putting up a sign on your front door inviting your customers to head over to the competition.

Preparing and testing your website for Black Friday and Cyber Monday therefore is essential.

The important thing is not to panic: crashing a website usually takes A LOT of traffic. Even so, it’s still worth giving your site a stress test before the big weekend. Think of it as giving your car an MOT before you compete in a Nascar rally event.

What can you do to make sure your store is fighting fit?

• Test the load capacity (the amount of activity your store can take before it packs it in) using tools such as LoadImpact.com. If your store is self-hosted, you may want to consider upgrading the service or your hosting plan to unlimited bandwidth.
• Test email marketing in advance – if you’re sending any automated emails over the period, test, test and test again that they are delivering properly and that the copy is clear. Sending the wrong email to the wrong customer could affect sales and really damage your brand in the long run by making you look amateur.
• Test your site across different browsers (Google, Firefox, Internet Explorer) and across different devices (mobile, tablet, desktop) to make sure it’s working smoothly on all of them. Your shoppers will use all manner of browsers on a number of devices, so it’s important to spread your net as wide as you can to avoid missing out on sales.
• Test your checkout process and make sure it can cope with a large volume of orders all at once. This is particularly important if you’re thinking of running flash deals or time-limited offers on the day.
• Ensure your website is mobile-friendly. A website that doesn’t load or function on a mobile device is the stuff Black Friday nightmares are made of.

Advice From Experts: Infinity Dish

Laura Fuentes

My number one tip for Cyber Monday is to make sure your site can handle the traffic pouring in.

Any tips for handling website traffic on BFCM?

Nothing frustrates a shopper more than slowed screens and glitches. Unless a shopper is intent on purchasing a particular item from your specific business, if glitches happen, they will move on and look for similar deals with your competitors. Use a service like Google to check your site speed and whether or not it is fully mobile compatible. Check these metrics out ahead of time so that you can upgrade your speeds and compatibility well before Cyber Monday is here.

Optimize Your Products For Sales

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Experts are currently predicting a 4.5% rise in holiday retail sales across key dates in 2023, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And according to our recent report on Black Friday statistics, 76% of Shopify customers were looking for high quality goods in 2022 rather than fast fashion items.

As a result, competition is much higher, and customers becoming more selective, so it’s crucial you give your products every chance of standing out.

If you took part in Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, the first step is to analyze your sales data to see what went well. Use the information to make alterations to existing product layouts and product descriptions.

Plan ahead by creating a product schedule that determines when a product goes on sale and its price. Rather than playing catch up, you can get ahead of the game and then make slight tweaks rather than making it up off the cuff. Website builders like Shopify have apps that can help you auto post products. We like BigCommerce’s Discount Manager (more on this later).

Your product descriptions should instill urgency. Remind people they only have a certain window to bag the bargains on offer by adding phrases like:

• Black Friday sale ends soon
• Limited time only
• Only one left
• In high demand
• Sold out soon

Add special mentions to Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the product descriptions to signpost their relevance to the shopper.

If you’re stocking products from any well-known brands, make sure the brand names appear in a prominent position – this doesn’t just improve your organic rankings (which equals more traffic and so more sales), it also adds credibility to your store and makes customers more likely to become repeat shoppers.

You might also think about running a keyword search on Google and using Google Trends to find some Black-Friday-related keywords for your products. Including these in your descriptions may give your site an SEO (search engine optimization) boost – by climbing Google’s rankings for relevant terms, you’ll get more traffic on the day and, hopefully, more sales.

The top search terms for Black Friday 2022 included Nintendo Switch Black Friday and Black Friday TV Deals, highlighting a need to alter your keyword targeting to be Black Friday-specific in the run up to, and during, the big weekend.

It’s also worth running a quick audit of your categories and product listings to make sure they’re up to date, to avoid overselling. There’s nothing worse than advertising a product you’re not able to deliver.

Plus, now might be a good time to review what you’re selling. The pandemic has changed consumer habits for the long-term, and purchases are starting to reflect this. People are spending more time at home, and products that fall into health and fitness, work at home, and eat at home have all seen an increase in sales. If you don’t want to completely rewrite your catalog, why not think about ways you can associate your current stock with these areas?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers are bargain hunters.

Be prepared: you’re going to have to slash at least 20 per cent off your items to compete. You might want to consider offering a free gift with your products as a little sweetener; web builders like Shopify allow you to add gift cards to your store for free.

You can also get in the holiday spirit and advertise a percentage of sales going to a charity, making shoppers more likely to purchase from your store. Learn more about holiday marketing tactics in our full guide, including how to target emotions and offer holiday discounts for your customers!

Expert Advice: Rebate Key

Ian Sells

Ian has been using marketing to grow businesses. He sold an Amazon brand first and is now managing over 10 million in sales.

If you’re going to run Black Friday deals, you want to be strategic.

What is a common Black Friday & Cyber Monday mistake?

A huge mistake a lot of retailers make is to give discounts on everything. When you discount everything, you’ll end up unnecessarily losing profit.

What advice do you have on the lead up to Black Friday?

Try using a high runner strategy to draw more people into your store and optimize for margin. Amazon uses a high runner strategy itself. To build a high runner strategy, all you need to do is determine the most popular products in your store, then discount those products as a way to drive traffic to your shop. Once a consumer is in your shop, they’re less likely to navigate away, which means you have the opportunity for strategic cross and up-sells of complementary products.

When it comes to discounts, the more creative the better.

Plenty of retailers will be offering 20% off, but how many will be offering “50% off for first-time buyers” or “30% off if you buy more than 5 pairs of shoes”? Let your imagination off the leash!

How to Design a Product Page has everything you need on designing a product page for your ecommerce site.

Everything about your store’s design on Black Friday and Cyber Monday should be geared towards making a sale and turning browsers into buyers.

The first thing to check is that your website is fully optimized for mobile visitors. Mobile shopping made up 51% of all online shoppers throughout Black Friday week in 2022, up from 46% in 2021.

Because of this, double-checking that your website layout configures properly on different screen sizes without compromising UX should be high on your priority list.

Making sure all of your content is mobile-friendly not only plays a large part in boosting your sales, but works in tandem with Google’s Core Web Vitals rollout to determine the search engine ranking of your store.

As well as poor mobile optimization, a sure way of missing out on sales is overlooking key opportunities for cross-selling and upselling.  For example, if you’ve got a great discount on a pair of shoes, cross-sell that customer some cut-price socks by displaying them on the same product page. Or, if you’re wondering how to upsell, advertise a better version of the shoes. Doing this is easy if you build categories of products that naturally fit together (like socks and shoes).

A customer should arrive on your store’s homepage and be in no doubt where to go.

Consider building distinct Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages to clearly signpost where your customers need to go to get the deals. Ultimately, you want your customers to get to your discounted products in as few clicks as possible.

Just like your product descriptions, your whole site should convey a sense of urgency. Here are two DIY steps to create a sense of urgency in the same time it takes to eat your dinner:

• Display discounts clearly on the homepage – this may sound obvious but it’s easy to get so caught up in your product pages that you forget to sort out the shop window.
• Add a countdown banner – a timer that ticks down to Black Friday and Cyber Monday can really help build excitement. Tools like Powr (fully integrated with BigCommerce) can help you do this for free in a matter of minutes.

Here’s an example of a countdown banner we added through Shopify:

You might think, “my checkout is working fine, if it isn’t broken, why try and fix it?”

That would be a mistake.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers are fickle – they’ve got thousands of stores to visit and a limited amount of time, and so won’t think twice about leaving you hanging at the checkout.

Taking some time to improve and optimize your checkout process could pay off on the day. In 2023, cart abandonment rate is 70.72%, so there’s always room to improve your customers experience at checkout.

Can you add extra payment options such as PayPal or Bitcoin? The more strings to your ecommerce bow the better because you’re giving your customers more opportunities to give you their money.

With 36% of American’s now having at least 3 digital devices to their name, a single online transaction can span multiple devices before completion. Tying shopping carts with accounts means your customers don’t lose their orders if they switch device, and you don’t risk losing out on almost a third of your revenue.

It’s a win-win!

Use Social Media To Drive Traffic

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Running campaigns on social media sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram can be a great way to get eyeballs on your ecommerce site; but it’s not enough to just push ads out there, you have to push those adds to the right people.

Watch out for Black Friday and Cyber Monday hashtags you can piggyback on. Using the social media plug-ins available from ecommerce website builders will let you integrate your store with Facebook or Twitter.

In our experience testing ecommerce stores, Facebook is the most effective channel to drive traffic to your site and generate sales. This is reflected in the stats we found in our recent report on digital marketing ROI statistics: it sees the best ROI, with 40% of marketers citing it as their leading social channel.

To give your social media strategy and campaigns the best chance of success, choose a quality product image and add your logo and some text advertising your deals. Make sure you start circulating the ad at least a few days in advance to build excitement. Leave it to the last minute and customers may only see your ad once, which means they’re unlikely to click through, given how many retailers will be demanding their attention.

Advice From Experts: Dark Horse Schooling

Tracy Brinkmann

Start working on your social media presence now to gain traction for those all important big sale days!

How do you leverage social media in this holiday season?

When it comes to social media there is a recipe to this – you cannot just be throwing random content out there and expect people to react. I mean it is social media, after all, so you have to be social, so put up some R&R content (i.e. jokes, funny stuff, throwbacks). Then some enlightening content (i.e. tips, trivia, etc). From there, toss in something to strike up a Conversation (i.e. polls, surveys, ask advice etc), as well as some Invigorating and Inspirational content (i.e. quotes, client success stories).

What is the outcome?

Once you’ve done that, hit them with a Promo (eg. show customer reviews, give a discount, invite them to a webinar). Finally, show off your Endeavour (i.e. show behind the scenes, let them see behind the curtain). Your spending time being social before you hit them with a ‘Buy My Stuff’ message.

Want to learn more about social media?

3 Easy Ways to Set Up a Facebook Store is the guide you need to get your Facebook marketing campaign off the ground.

Learn How To Grow Your Business on Social Media in our helpful guide.

Send Top-Quality Email Marketing Campaigns

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For many of us, Black Friday and Cyber Monday can feel overwhelming. Email gives you the chance to cut through the noise and provide a really personal offering to your customers.

We asked 65 business owners, which channel was the most effective for marketing, and 24% said email marketing!

Make sure you start your email campaign at least a week in advance to whet your customers’ appetite for the sales you’re going to offer them on across the weekend.

A simple but effective email campaign would include:

• One weekly email from four weeks until Black Friday.
• An email both the night before Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
• An email on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

You may even consider offering your long-standing customers a special VIP offer over email. For example, you could give them a sneak preview of your Black Friday and Cyber Monday discounts and offer them an early chance to buy them. This can be a great way to build up brand trust; because repeat customers are more valuable to you, it also makes commercial sense.

Email gives you the chance to provide a really personal offering to your customers. Research shows that personalization helped increase email open rate by 30% and click rate by 50% on average

Advice From Experts: USA Wholesale

Alexis Frankel

In the past, the best campaigns I've produced have been for Black Friday/Cyber Monday ($10,000+ in a single day from email campaigns).

Is email marketing valuable during the Black Friday season?

Leads are in the mindset to buy and will do so if they see what they like. Give them what they want! Use data from their previous purchases, abandoned cart items, and average order value to target specific promotions that they will be interested in. Make sure to tweak and test for the best results.

Even if you do all of the above, you’re not done.

Make sure you follow up after Black Friday and Cyber Monday to ask for feedback and invite them to revisit your store.

Adding an automated abandoned cart recovery email is a great way of stopping customers slipping through the net. If a customer gets all the way to the checkout but then fails to purchase, they’ll get a follow-up email allowing them to go straight back to their cart.

This is a useful tool for your customers and potentially profitable one for you!

Black Friday and Cyber Monday online shoppers are ruthless. With so many retailers competing for their attention, they can afford to be.

If your store is even remotely slow to load, many shoppers will simply vote with their feet and close the tab. Big, colorful product pictures and homepage banner images make your site look good but they can also affect load time and hit your conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who go on to make a purchase) and your rankings in Google.

The simple way to solve this issue is to use an image optimizer. These are tools that compress your image into a smaller version, without affecting the dimensions or the quality. Shopify has its own tool to help store owners resize and optimize images, but we’ve used a tool called Kraken.io before, which also works well.

Other helpful pages:

• Image Optimization for Best Website Performance – Find out what steps you can take to optimize your images and boost your site’s performance.
• How to Take Product Photos – Give your products the best chance with our guide to great product photography.

Determining how much your shipping will cost is almost as important as determining how much the product itself costs.

High shipping costs can be off-putting to shoppers, especially those looking for big bargains. In fact, many Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers will expect free delivery.

It’s up to you to weigh up the cost of free shipping against the discount you’re offering. For example, many shoppers would rather have free shipping worth $6 than a discount of $10, bizarrely.

A survey conducted by Finances Online found that almost half (49%) of all Black Friday 2022 shoppers stated shipping rates as their primary influencer for making a purchase and that they could be swayed into making an order if they were offered free shipping.

Advice From Experts: M&I

Brian Deschesare

Use a loss leader product, and offer free shipping on expensive orders.

What are your thoughts on shipping costs during Black Friday?

A ‘loss leader’ is a product sold at a loss to bring in more customers. You might be wondering why you would ever sell a product at a loss, but the idea is simple. You want to make it cheap enough to get them shopping. That way, they’ll start taking a look at the rest of your products, and they’ll buy even more.

Is using a loss leader too risky?

Without first using a loss leader, your customers might not even start shopping with you. There needs to be that ‘initial push’ that gets them browsing your store. The next step is to introduce free shipping over a certain amount.

Now that they have one cheap item in their basket, they’re going to start browsing through the rest of your selection. This is when you advertise that you offer “free shipping on orders over $50”, for example. Your customers are now a lot more likely to find items that they like.

With Walmart and Amazon dominating Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, you might feel like a small fish in a big pond.

The trick is to turn this to your advantage.

One way to do this is by providing personal and quality online customer service. If you haven’t already, write a detailed FAQs section specific to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so any questions your customers might have can be dealt with as seamlessly as possible. Make sure you cover key areas such as:

• Your refunds and returns policy.
• How long your sale lasts for.
• Expected delivery time.

If you employ any staff to help you run your store, make sure you give them a brief pep talk on the importance of being polite and helpful. You could provide them with certain customer service phrases or advice on how to respond to negative reviews, to ensure all customer interactions end on a positive note.

Anything you can do to improve the on-site level of service can have a big effect. You might, for example, want to introduce AI into your customer service, or consider investing in an app through your store builder platform that allows you to integrate a live chat service. LiveChat, a premium online chat software you can easily integrate with your BigCommerce store, offers a free 30-day trial, so time it right and you can add a really attractive customer service tool for free.

If you aren’t using conversational technology as part of your ecommerce strategy, Black Friday and Cyber Monday make for the perfect excuse to get started.

With over 130 million people visiting US online stores over Cyber Weekend 2022, digital shopping isn’t set to go anywhere anytime soon – voice technology and chat solutions are ideal for bridging the gap between online and in-person shopping experiences.

Conversational commerce covers everything from voice search (assistant) technology to chatbots and boxes. Each can be used to bolster customer service efforts, as well as acting as an extra channel for matching customers with new deals and upselling related products.

Given that almost 33.3% of the global population now shops online, conversational technology fills the person-sized hole left in your shopping experience. For example, fashion stores like H&M use chatbots to deliver custom recommendations to customers, whilst Alexa reports all of the best Black Friday deals when asked. There are plenty of ways for you to use and optimize for voice search!

So at the very least, we recommend installing a chatbot to your site to give customers a deeper level of service, even when they’re shopping digitally. Not only will it foster better relationships, but it’ll drive sales, too – with business leaders estimating that chatbots result in a 67% increase in sales.

Advice From Experts: The Converted Click

Dave Nilsson

Our voice search optimization strategy gave us an increase in website traffic of 23.7% and an increase in sales leads of 34.2%.

Why did you add conversational technology to your website?

As SEO specialists we have implemented voice search optimization on our website with great success. We implemented voice search optimization on our website to increase our sales leads.

How does this help your customers?

Our approach is to focus on creating detailed answers to common conversational questions from our customers. For each question, we create content that gives clear and concise answers. Our content framework starts with a headline asking a common question, provides a concise answer in the first paragraph, then elaborates with further details in the rest of the page.

Smooth Shipping and Returns

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Touch wood, you’ll be receiving more orders than usual across Black Friday and Cyber Monday. A lot more orders, hopefully.

It’s crucial to make sure your shipping process can cope and you’re not going to fail to deliver orders if they’re coming through thick and fast, or that you won’t sell out too quickly and end up failing to meet demand. Contact your supplier and make sure they know what’s happening.

Test your order fulfillment process, whether you’re using a dropshipper, a manual system or a fulfillment app like ShipStation.

You also need to ensure you’ve set up a smooth and optimized returns process. Black Friday and Cyber Monday may result in a lot of sales, but they can result in a lot of returns too if customers aren’t happy with the items or regret their purchase made in a haze of discounts and deals.

Plan your returns process in advance, make it easy to find the relevant information on your website, and don’t keep customers waiting for a refund. Good returns management, and an easy returns process, can help to ensure they return to your online store in the future.

Optimize for Mobile & Desktop

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When making sure your store is ready for the busiest shopping days of the year, it’s easy to forget how important it is to make sure all the changes we’ve suggested work as well on mobile as they do on desktop.

Mobile devices made up a staggering 76% of all Cyber Week traffic in 2022, with the upward trend predicted to continue in 2023.

Don’t forget to look at navigation on a mobile, mobile responsiveness and the buying process.

Advice From Experts: The Gray Dot Company

Tory Gray

I recommend testing your site’s mobile compatibility in anticipation of these big-spending days.

What are your mobile and desktop recommendations for BFCM?

It’s more important to target mobile searches than ever before. Mobile makes up a whopping 61 percent of Google’s organic search traffic. Mobile users are also more likely to convert than desktop users, so it’s crucial that you are mobile-ready in the lead up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I recommend testing your site’s mobile compatibility in anticipation of these big-spending days. You should test your site’s responsiveness, loading time, and image sizes to make sure they are mobile-ready. Not only can mobile compatibility make for better user experience, but it can also improve your ranking and visibility on Google.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Best Practices

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Many retailers get caught up in the competitiveness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday and risk damaging their brand with unethical practices. Here are a few rules of thumb to bear in mind:

• DON’T spam customers with relentless emails. Just because they’ve bought from you or signed up to your newsletter doesn’t give you right to abuse their inbox.
• DO always have an unsubscribe button on any emails.
• DON’T offer promotions or products in paid advertising that you aren’t offering on the site. Customers must get what they were promised when they click on a paid advert.
• DO offer genuine discounts. Don’t raise the price a week before and then drop it back down to its original price but advertise it as a discount. You’ll be caught out and shoppers will punish you in the long run.
• DON’T be rude to customers requesting refunds or making inquiries. Black Friday and Cyber Monday can be stressful, but you should always remain professional and courteous.
• DO make sure any pop-ups you add to your website are as unobtrusive and as relevant as possible. We’d suggest they only appear after a visitor has been on your page for 10 seconds. There is nothing more off-putting than arriving on a webpage only to be attacked by a pop-up immediately.

Not built your online store yet?

Don’t worry it’s not too late!

• How to Build an Online Store – get the tools you need to get ready for Black Friday online sales.
• Online Store Builders Comparison Chart – our comparison chart will help you find the perfect online store builder for you.
• Best Website Builders – discover the best website builders compared side by side.

There are no hard-and-fast rules, Black Friday and Cyber Monday trends are always evolving and changing. With it we’re always updating our content to keep you in the best of loops!

We hope we’ve helped prepare you for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the biggest shopping dates in the calendar. Standing out of the crowd can feel impossible if you’re a small online store with limited resource.

But if you ask yourself the right questions, and take the right steps, you can ride the Black Friday and Cyber Monday wave and get in on the action!

Hopefully this guide has shown you some easy DIY methods to get your ecommerce store ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, without needing to hire an expensive developer or a designer, and pointed you in the direction of some really helpful tools available from top ecommerce website builders.

If you haven’t even built your ecommerce store yet, it’s never too late to get up and running.

Check out the Best Ecommerce Website Builders and the Best Free Ecommerce Website Builders to find which builder is best for you and your store.

Explore the Best Ecommerce Software to help you sell online, which shows you how quickly and easily you can build an online store and start selling, without needing any technical knowledge whatsoever.

Let’s hear it for a successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday!

More Information

• How to Design a Customer-Winning Product Page for Your eCommerce Store: Part 1 – for the 8 pieces of content your ecommerce product page must have if you want to supercharge your online store.
• How To Sell Online | 4 Superb eCommerce Solutions To Help You Succeed – your one-stop guide to selling online successfully, covering everything from building a brand to technology that helps you sell.