Black Friday Cyber Monday is just around the corner! 📅 This exciting shopping rush begins the weekend after Thanksgiving, on the fourth Thursday in November.

While online shoppers eagerly await the best deals of the year 🛍️, are your preparations limited to just "stocking up enough inventory for the upcoming season"? 📦 If so, you might be missing a few important spots. 👀

Successfully managing BFCM is a multifaceted task, and you must successfully manage multiple areas, such as marketing, customer support, inventory planning, order fulfillment, and more. Because each of these areas plays a critical role in ensuring your store runs smoothly during the high-demand period.

Luckily, countless tools are available for each task, but only a few can truly enhance your Shopify store’s efficiency during BFCM. This blog is all about those top solutions. Let’s start!

Why is BFCM Important for Shopify stores?

69% of online sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday were made through Shopify stores. 🤯 Considering Shopify’s popularity as a shopping channel during BFCM, it's crucial for merchants to optimize their stores and strategies to fully take advantage of this high-demand period. Increased volume of orders helps merchants to maximize their profit and gain new customers.

But it's not just about volume; BFCM is also a great time to clear out dead stock. You can use strategies like bundling, offering extra discounts, or selling to wholesalers to move products that have been gathering dust.

Moreover, BFCM is an amazing opportunity to turn new customers into regulars. Those one-time buyers? With the right follow-ups and personalized offers, they can become loyal customers after the holiday rush. It's the perfect time to increase your profits, clear dead inventory, and build a customer base.

That’s why overcoming the most common challenges during the BFCM is vital, and with the right solutions, you can overcome BFCM hurdles and ensure your Shopify store runs smoothly.

Common Black Friday Cyber Monday Challenges of Shopify Stores and Their Solutions

Shopify stores' challenges during BFCM are not drastically different from those at other times of the year. However, the surge in demand can intensify issues related to inventory planning📦, customer support💬, marketing📈, and product delivery🚚, making them more severe and costly. 💸 Preventing these problems is possible with effective solutions. Let’s explore the most common issues and the best apps to tackle them.

📦 Planning Inventory

One of Shopify stores ' biggest challenges is forecasting demand and planning inventory for the BFCM period. This is because the demand spikes during these peak periods are significantly different from other times of the year, and when they are not managed well, Shopify stores face multiple inventory problems, such as out-of-stock and overstock.

During Black Friday, out-of-stock happens when demand spikes faster than expected, depleting inventory quickly. On the other hand, overstock occurs when stores overestimate demand and end up with excess stock, tying up resources. These issues also can cause delays in product delivery. All of these result from the lack of robust planning tools and significantly reduce the profitability of your Shopify store. As a solution, you should take seasonality into account when predicting sales and making future plans for peak seasons. That means you must analyze sales data from previous BFCM periods when preparing for this year’s BFCM.

Sounds complicated? Well, it might be if you’re using Excel for inventory planning for such a busy period. Since Excel lacks real-time data, assessing your past data correctly and developing an accurate past BFCM analysis is harder. Besides, it takes much more time to compare advanced inventory solutions. Even if you spend time analyzing past BFCM data, the reliability is still questioned because Excel is prone to errors. To sum up, using Excel for planning can be risky, potentially wasting both your time and money.

However, forecasting BFCM sales and planning your Shopify inventory can be easy, quick, and efficient with a robust inventory planning solution such as Fabrikatör.

📱 Fabrikatör helps you create seasonal inventory plans with advanced analytics, making your BFCM period more profitable. You can accurately analyze last year’s BFCM data, identify changes in demand, set a realistic growth rate for the upcoming season, and create a solid inventory plan. It provides you with effective planning and speeds up your operations. With its automated replenishment process, you can keep selling without running out of stock. Moreover, you can quickly generate purchase orders and select the most cost-efficient purchasing routes with freight planning. With Fabrikatör, you can better assess sales opportunities during BFCM and easily increase your profits. See it in action for more.

💳 Fabrikatör offers three different plans for various needs of small to growing Shopify stores, with monthly fees ranging from $99 to $199 per user. Learn more about this 5/5-rated Shopify app.

📌 Even if inventory planning is done efficiently, you can still face stockout due to unexpected global trends, especially if you’re running an apparel store. With Fabrikatör, you can accept backorders and keep selling, as well as generate cash flow when you’re temporarily out of stock. You can read How does backorder work? and Backorder Benefits for Your eCommerce Store for more detail.

📞 Customer Support

On customer success, we believe Jason Lemkin when he said:

‘’Customer success is where 90% of the revenue is.’’

So, if you want your Shopify store to grow quickly and be highly profitable, you must understand that this is only possible with satisfied customers. Especially during a busy period like BFCM, when you can gain many new customers, responding quickly to your customer's needs and inquiries is crucial.

However, using manual customer support solutions during BFCM can cause you to miss some customer messages, leaving some inquiries unanswered and delayed responses. That’s because manual customer support methods require constant manual monitoring and updating, which is challenging in peak seasons.

To avoid the hurdles of manual solutions and provide timely and effective support for customers, you can use Gorgias. It centralizes all your customer communication in one place, helping you manage the increased volume during BFCM without missing a beat.

📱Gorgias is an AI-powered customer experience app that simplifies and automates customer support. It brings all your support channels together and equips your team with an AI Agent that quickly answers tickets, performs tasks, and maintains your brand’s tone. Gorgias also provides 24/7 support to boost your team’s speed and efficiency.

💳 The app offers various monthly plans to suit different needs and budgets, ranging from $10 to $900. You can learn more here.

Mastering Bundling

Bundling during BFCM can be tough because of the high order volume, tricky pricing, and managing inventory. Plus, you have to deal with customer expectations and potential technical issues. However, with a successful bundling tool, you can increase the average order value during BFCM. When you group products together, you can clear out slow-moving inventory while increasing the appeal of popular items. Plus, it simplifies the shopping experience, making it easier for customers to choose and increasing the chances of larger purchases. How to use it?

• Make an ABC analysis first to identify your best-selling and slow-moving items,
• Combine them into special-price bundles to boost sales and clear out inventory,
• Group complementary items or those that fit a specific BFCM theme,
• Highlight your bundles and make their promotions,
• Track how different bundles perform and refine them based on sales data,
• Make your bundles available only during BFCM or in limited quantities to drive quick sales,

and voilà! ✨ You’ve boosted your sales during BFCM and significantly reduced your slow-moving inventory. But what tool can help you manage the bundling process quickly and efficiently for your Shopify store? It’s the Bundler-Product Bundles app.

📱During BFCM, you can use the Bundler app to create classic bundles, mix & match bundles, quantity breaks, and tiered discounts. It boosts your sales through targeted promotions and bundle landing pages and supports subscriptions for ongoing customer engagement. Besides, this Shopify app is easy to use with its user-friendly interface, saving you time during the busy BFCM period.

💳 The Bundler app is very budget-friendly with its two paid plans: $6.99 per month and $9.99 per month. There is also a free version available. You can check it out here.

Better Gifting Experience

Many customers will visit your Shopify stores to purchase gifts for their loved ones during BFCM. With the increased demand for gifts, Shopify stores face challenges such as managing personalized gift messages, coordinating message delivery timing, and efficiently handling gift cards and store credit. Giftnote addresses these issues by simplifying the gifting process for your store.

📱Giftnote simplifies the gift messaging process by integrating a fully branded experience into your store. Users can add gift messages via a custom widget or at checkout, choosing when to deliver them (immediately, later, or upon gift arrival). It also enhances Gift Cards with the same seamless experience and offers Store Credit and integrations with platforms like Klaviyo. With Giftnote, you can transform your gifting process, surprise recipients with timely messages, and convert one-time gift recipients into loyal customers.

💳 The app offers only one plan for $19 per month. Learn more here.

Simplify Accounting before BFCM

Keeping up with sales accounting details during BFCM may be challenging due to the high volume of orders. By using a top-notch accounting app, you can effortlessly manage the influx of transactions, track discounts and promotions, and ensure your financials are accurate. This means you can focus on sales strategies to increase your profit, knowing your accounting is in expert hands. This reliable and efficient accounting app is none other than QuickBooks.

📱QuickBooks Online is a powerful tool for managing your Shopify store’s finances. It helps you easily track income and expenses, ensuring accurate financial records amidst the sales surge. It is especially handy with its automated structure for peak periods like BFCM. With QuickBooks, you can automate the entry of invoices, manage inventory, and stay on top of your tax deductions, reducing the risk of errors and saving you time. This allows you to focus on driving sales and delivering great customer experiences while keeping your bookkeeping in check. Plus, it is now integrated with Fabrikatör. You can send your purchase orders to QuickBooks Online and streamline your accounting processes with enhanced inventory planning.

💳 QuickBooks Online offers three different plans, with prices ranging from $30 to $85 per month, depending on the features included. You can learn more here.

High-Converting Landing Pages for BFCM Campaigns

Imagine landing pages as the showcase for your Shopify store, prominently displaying your BFCM discounts and promotions. That’s why using a landing page builder allows you to create targeted, high-converting landing pages highlighting special offers, promotions, and exclusive deals. You can design pages that capture attention, drive conversions, and showcase your best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Therefore, you can offer a more focused shopping experience, increase customer engagement, and boost sales during the busy holiday season. One of the best Shopify apps you can use to build landing pages for BFCM is Pagefly Landing Page Builder.

📱PageFly Landing Page Builder can significantly enhance your Shopify store by allowing you to build and design stunning, high-converting pages without any coding. You can use its easy drag-and-drop editor to create custom landing pages for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and add elements like color swatches, cross-selling options, and sales countdowns to drive conversions. With extensive integration capabilities, you can seamlessly add features such as reviews, product customizers, and bundles. Plus, PageFly ensures your pages are SEO-optimized, responsive, and perform well across devices.

💳 PageFly offers two paid plans: the Limited version at $24 per month and the Unlimited version at $99 per month. Learn more here.

Managing Discounts Efficiently

Discounts constitute the main component of the BFCM period. However, constantly updating discounts and displaying them for products can be especially challenging for Shopify stores with large inventory. Discounts constitute the main component of the BFCM period. However, constantly updating discounts and displaying them for products can be especially challenging for Shopify stores with large inventory. Therefore, using a discount app during BFCM would help you simplify promotions and discount management.

📱Discounty makes managing discounts during BFCM easy. You can quickly set up and combine various discounts like bulk, quantity, and cart discounts. For example, you can create offers like "Buy 2, Get 10% Off" or "Spend $100, Get 10% Off" to boost your store's average order values. Plus, this Shopify app lets you filter products by collections or tags, add sale badges, and set percentage or fixed amount discounts. You can also schedule discount campaigns to run automatically, and Discounty will handle updates for you. Besides, its simple interface and helpful support make it easy to launch effective discount campaigns during the holiday rush.

💳 This app offers three different paid plans, with monthly prices ranging from $9 to $49.90, depending on your needs. You can learn more now.

Drive Sales with Timer-Countdown

During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, millions of Shopify stores offer discounts, giving customers many options for finding discounted products they want. This can lead to a slower decision-making process and an increased number of abandoned purchases. To prevent this problem, you can use a timer bar to speed up the sales process and create a sense of urgency for customers. These time bars:

⏰ Encourage customers to act quickly on limited-time offers,

🛒 Motivate shoppers to finalize their orders before the offer expires.

🔥 Draw attention to special discounts and promotions, making them more compelling.

📅 Highlight preorders and build excitement for upcoming products.

and the Essential Countdown Timer Bar is ideal to use for this purpose.

📱The Essential Countdown Timer Bar app allows you to customize the countdown timer's text, colors, and placement to match your store’s branding. You can set timers for specific days, recurring events, or fixed-minute intervals, making it ideal for promotions, pre-orders, product launches, and flash sales. It’s particularly effective during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other high-traffic periods, helping you drive more immediate sales and maximize your revenue.

💳 It offers three paid plans to meet the varying needs of Shopify users, with prices ranging from $6.99 to $29.99 per month. You can access more here.

🤳 On-point Marketing with Email & SMS for BFCM

With over 2 million merchants on Shopify, standing out during the busy BFCM period is incredibly challenging due to intense competition. 🤯 To stand out, you should follow a marketing process that is both precise and fast.

Managing effective marketing and personalizing customer interactions becomes overwhelming without the right tools. If you’re using Excel for customer data, campaign plans, sales reports, and various marketing lists, you already know how inefficient it could be. Excel can’t handle large datasets well, making it easy to miss important data. Manual updates lead to errors; without automation, you risk missing out on optimizing your campaigns in real-time. As a result, you might miss key insights, make mistakes in your campaigns, and ultimately see poor performance and customer engagement.

You can use Klaviyo to eliminate these problems before BFCM. It helps you to manage customer data efficiently, automate your campaigns, and track your store’s real-time performance.

📱Klaviyo is a powerful tool for Shopify owners during BFCM; it offers personalized email campaigns based on customer behavior and purchase history. Thanks to integration with Fabrikatör, it helps manage backorders proactively by using information from Fabrikatör to inform customers about restocks and reduce cancellations. Additionally, with data and analytics Fabrikatör generated, Klaviyo enables strategic email campaigns, ensuring timely and relevant communications. Its integration with Shopify enhances your email marketing efforts, increases sales, and improves customer satisfaction during the busiest shopping season.

💳 Klaviyo has two paid plans: the combined email and SMS package costs $60 per month, while the email-only package costs $45 per month. There’s also a free plan available for starters. Click here for more details.

🛍️ Fulfilling orders while customers eagerly waiting

Fulfilling orders during BFCM is another challenging operation due to a sudden increase in order volume. When customers look forward to their orders, stores face pressure to process and ship orders quickly.

Managing your store during BFCM can be overwhelming. An increased number of orders can quickly expose any weaknesses in your fulfillment processes. You might find yourself constantly updating inventory, avoiding stockout, or rushing to get orders out the door. Besides, keeping customers informed about their orders while dealing with a flood of support requests can become a full-time job in itself. When done manually or without the right system in place, all these tasks can lead to mistakes, delays, and a lot of stress. But it doesn’t have to be that way—you can simplify the fulfillment process with ShipHero.

📱 For BFCM and all peak seasons, you can use ShipHero to streamline your warehouse operations and eliminate the hassle of picking, packing, postage, and shipping by automatizing them during the busiest shopping season. ShipHero also integrates with major shipping carriers, simplifying label printing and tracking, which reduces errors and speeds up delivery times. By reducing manual tasks and errors, ShipHero ensures that your fulfillment runs smoothly, even during the busiest times like BFCM.

💳 The starting price for ShipHero is $1,850/month and includes basic features. It also offers the 3PL plan and Enterprise+ plan, which cost $1,995/month and $2,750/month. Click here to learn more.

Optimizing Shopify Store for Upcoming BFCM

You might be wondering if it's really necessary to optimize your Shopify store with BFCM approaching. Think back to last year's BFCM: how did your actual demand compare to your initial plans? ⚖️ Did you experience any issues or missed opportunities? Reviewing your past BFCM performance 🔍 can help you understand the importance of getting things right this year.

• If your store’s promotions didn’t reach the right audience,
• Managing customer communication and support was more challenging than expected,
• You lost customers or didn’t meet your sales targets,

Most importantly, if you found yourself constantly dealing with stockouts and rushing to place new orders during BFCM—often paying extra to suppliers—you must focus on improving your inventory planning. You need to create an efficient plan for your inventory, ensuring that no details are overlooked and no tools are missed during the planning process. 📘 You can use Fabrikatör’s Inventory Planning Playbook for BFCM to learn more about how to make efficient inventory planning for the upcoming peak season. In addition, you can access our Operational Checklist 🗒️ to prepare for the upcoming BFCM process and keep track of progress with your team.

Having efficient inventory planning would be the right first step to achieving BFCM success, as having enough inventory and making timely deliveries is necessary for a successful BFCM period. That’s why using an advanced solution is key to handling BFCM effectively.

Fabrikatör: Inventory Planning Game-changer for BFCM

BFCM is all about selling discounted products to the right customers without stock issues and generating cash flow; that’s what Fabrikatör promises you. 📈 You can effectively and efficiently manage all your inventory operations with Fabrikatör, which is essential for your Shopify store’s success. ✨

With Fabrikatör, the upcoming BFCM can turn out differently from last year’s—with fewer problems, less stress, and more profit. How? 🤔

• Adopt a more proactive approach when planning inventory: plan ahead realistically 📈 with Fabrikatör’s advanced sales planning, avoid last-minute POs and stock issues during BFCM,
• Don’t overthink 🔄 when to replenish stock; let Fabrikatör do it for you,
• Integrate with valuable apps such as 📦 ShipHero and 📧 Klaviyo to manage BFCM efficiently,
• You don’t need to tell your customers you’re out of stock; tell them you keep selling using backorders,
• Master your past data with 📊 powerful analytics to be better prepared for the upcoming peak season,
• Choose the most 💸 cost-efficient purchasing routes to decrease your costs,
• Sleep well 😴 without the stress of possible BFCM problems,

…and more!

Do you have questions about how to use Fabrikatör and are curious about its features? If you have 30 minutes, you can see Fabrikatör in action now!

📌 Friendly reminder: 30 minutes is nothing when compared to the time you’ll invest in manual inventory planning methods during BFCM.

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