This year, Black Friday starts on November 29th, and Cyber Monday follows on December 2nd, 2024. 🗓️ This is a crucial time period for small Shopify store owners because, in BFCM, they can make a significant amount of sales and contribute to the growth of their store. 📈 Therefore, they should prepare effectively and fine-tune their strategies before the season begins. Do also have a small Shopify store? Keep reading then because, in this blog, we will share valuable tips for you to maximize your BFCM success and make the most of this busy shopping season. Let’s start with identifying the most common challenges you can face during BFCM. 🔍

The Most Common Inventory Planning Challenges Small Shopify Business Face During BFCM

The BFCM period might be extra tough for your small Shopify business due to the limited resources, high customer demand, and inventory management challenges. Problems in tracking, managing, and forecasting inventory will likely happen when you cannot efficiently manage intense competition and increased customer expectations during this peak season. Therefore, you can experience more intense versions of your daily inventory struggles during BFCM. What are those?

Stock Imbalances

Planning inventory for BFCM can be challenging, especially when you're not used to handling such high demand for your small Shopify store. Consequently, preparing sufficient stock before BFCM can be quite difficult. If your inventory falls short of actual demand, you may face stockout, losing potential sales and customers. On the other hand, if you overstock as a precaution, you might have to pay extra storage costs and face cash flow issues. 📦

Forecasting Hurdles

To successfully make inventory plans, reliable forecasting is essential, but for BFCM, you should also consider seasonality for efficient plans. 📊 However, many small Shopify stores rely on manual tools like Excel, making it difficult to accurately analyze sales data from specific periods. Even if you make your forecasts using this method, the results can be misleading due to the limitations of Excel in handling complex data and seasonality.

Delays in Supply Chain Process

If your stock doesn’t arrive on time ⏰, you could run out of popular items and miss sales opportunities. During BFCM, when demand is high, even minor delays in the supply chain can become major problems for your Shopify store.

Lack of Real-time Inventory Tracking

Some small Shopify stores use spreadsheets to manage and control their inventory information. However, Excel requires constant updates and manual data entry to provide accurate information. This is challenging because it demands significant time and effort, which small businesses often can’t afford, and use inaccurate data to make inventory plans for peak seasons. The result? Stock issues and missed sales opportunities during crucial times like BFCM.

📌 Need a guide to perfect your inventory planning process? With the Inventory Planning Playbook, learn how to manage your inventory before, during, and after the BFCM season! Access here!

Essential BFCM Inventory Planning Tips for Small Shopify Stores

Yes, BFCM is a challenging season, but it promises the year's highest revenue. You can manage this period smoothly and profitably by applying useful analyses and the right strategies, putting customer satisfaction first, and using solutions matching your small Shopify store’s needs.

🛍️ Use Preorders in a Smart Way

Being proactive and accepting preorders before BFCM might benefit your small Shopify store. Accepting preorders allows customers to purchase items before they’re officially available. This means your small Shopify store can start generating sales and have insight into market demand before the high-demand season begins.

• If your small business is growing, you likely have new products. Since they were unavailable last year, you don’t know which will be more popular and in higher demand. You can accept preorders before the BFCM period and see how demand shapes. This way, you can arrange stock levels accordingly and eliminate the stockout risk in the BFCM.
• Preorders also help you gain revenue before the season begins to overcome cash flow problems. You can make early purchases from suppliers and negotiate better deals.

📌 Would you like to see how you can use preorders as a valuable peak-season strategy in detail? Check Advent Calendars with Preorder Strategy.

📌 Read How to Use Preorders & Backorders for BFCM? for more detail.

📊 Forecast Demand with Seasonality in Mind

During this challenging peak-demand period, you should definitely consider seasonality when forecasting sales and making inventory plans. But what does this actually mean?

• First, you should analyze the past year’s sales and identify the demand changes throughout the last BFCM period. Now, you know how demand will fluctuate in the upcoming BFCM season. An advanced inventory planning solution like Fabrikatör can help you to do this analysis easily.
• Secondly, you need a new goal, especially if the number and variety of your products have expanded in the past year.
• Congratulations! You made the seasonality analysis and set your sales goals before the BFCM started. You now clearly understand the inventory levels needed for the upcoming BFCM season. You can start creating your purchase orders.

Now, let’s take a broader perspective and fill in the missing pieces as much as possible to get closer to making precise inventory planning decisions.

🤝 Optimize Supply Chain

Early birds always win when it’s supply chain operations, so planning ahead will save you time and money. One little problem in the supply chain could result in your small store being out of stock or making late customer deliveries. Building strong relationships with suppliers, planning purchase routes, and negotiating deals before the high season would help minimize these problems.

• After forecasting demand, you know approximately how much stock you need for the BFCM. Therefore, you can make early deals with your suppliers and negotiate better deals. Otherwise, you might have to pay much higher prices if you run out of stock during BFMC.🫣 This could negatively impact your cash flow during such a busy period. Fortunately, you’ve got your plan in place! 😎
• Planning delivery schedules with suppliers in advance is especially crucial for your small Shopify business. 🚚 Why? Because during BFCM, suppliers are often overwhelmed with orders, and delays can easily occur. If you don't plan ahead, you risk not receiving your inventory on time, leading to stockout, missed sales, and unhappy customers. These customers’ negative experiences and comments can seriously harm your store’s reputation and damage its growth. If you don’t have a large base of loyal customers, the crowded BFCM period with many alternatives can cause you to lose customers instead of gaining them. You can eliminate delays and keep customers happy by coordinating your purchasing and delivery schedules before the BFCM starts.
• Choosing cost-efficient deliveries is as important as making timely deliveries when you have limited resources. If you plan early, you can benefit from freight planning and choose the most cost-saving routes for your purchases.

Manage Backorders and Preorders Efficiently ⏳

Accepting backorders during BFCM can be a smart strategy to keep earning revenue when popular products are temporarily out of stock. With backorders, you can reduce the risk of losing customers and continue to generate cash flow. However, managing them efficiently is crucial to ensure customer satisfaction and maintain your store's reputation.

• Building transparent communication with customers while managing backorders is crucial. To achieve this, you can integrate two powerful tools: Fabrikatör and Klaviyo. Fabrikatör allows you to accept backorders, while Klaviyo helps you inform your customers by emailing updates about their order status.

📌 You can read  Backorder Benefits for Your eCommerce Store for more details.

📌 Are you a Klaviyo user? Here, you can find ready-to-use Klaviyo templates for backorders.

🧹 Clear Out Deadstock

Having deadstock 👜👜👜 on your Shopify store is disadvantageous; it can limit your ability to invest in new or high-demand products and cause extra storage costs. You can use BFCM as an opportunity to clear these products. Well, but how?

• With a bundling strategy, you can pair slow-moving products with popular ones and make the deals attractive with a promotion aligned with the BFCM spirit. This strategy helps reduce inventory while increasing the chances of these items being purchased.
• Using extra promotions also helps to decrease storage costs and maximize cash flow. Besides, you can create limited-time offers to create urgency among customers and quickly move dead stock out of your inventory.

❗An automated inventory planning tool like Fabrikatör will identify which products aren’t selling well and notify you that they should no longer be restocked. If you don’t have such a tool, be sure to double-check your inventory manually to avoid holding onto deadstock.

📌 Bundling, inventory management, marketing, and more! Discover 10 Top Shopify Apps for Successful BFCM.

📈 Monitor Inventory in Real-Time

During BFCM, inventory levels can fluctuate rapidly due to increased sales and changing customer demand. As a small Shopify store owner, you need real-time data to track these changes accurately and maintain full inventory visibility. In this way, you can respond quickly to low stock levels or unexpected demand spikes and avoid being overstocked or running out of popular items. Real-time monitoring helps maintain a balanced inventory, keeping operations smooth and customers satisfied during the year's busiest shopping days.

🕵️ Analyze Data Comprehensively

As we also mentioned in the seasonal forecasting part, you should always start with a comprehensive analysis.

• Let's say you've been selling new products for the past six months but never sold them during a BFCM period. How will you know which one to stock more? You can make an ABC analysis! It helps you identify your products' popularity, prioritize stocking up on the most popular ones, and be fully prepared before the high-demand season kicks off.

❗Be careful if you’re using a manual solution such as Excel; the data accuracy may be poor, and the results of your analyses can be misleading. Therefore, making inventory decisions using this data for BFCM may cause inventory issues like overstock and out-of-stock. You can migrate to an efficient solution before the BFCM starts.

🗒️ Leave Manual Solutions Behind

Relying on Excel on a regular shopping day is already a challenge, but during BFCM, it’s a different story. As a small Shopify store owner, you can struggle with inventory planning, especially if you use spreadsheets. The problem? Manual data entry is slow and prone to errors, which can decrease the accuracy of your forecasts and cause stockout when it matters most, as we mentioned earlier. It might be the right time to move to an automated solution that gives you real-time insights, helping you forecast more accurately and keep your business running smoothly.

📌 Just like overlooked Excel data, many other tasks can slip through your eyes during the busy BFCM period. If you want to effectively manage all the operational steps for your small business during this peak season, you can check out our Operational Checklist for BFCM.

🚀 Use a Reliable Inventory Management Solution

Are you worried about the extra costs of third-party apps? What about the cost of the stock issues you experienced because you were using Excel? 💸

Excel lacks the essential features for successful inventory management; it’s time-consuming and highly prone to errors due to its manual nature.

On the other hand, with a reliable inventory planning solution, you can enter the BFCM period with realistic plans. You can automatize replenishment, create purchase orders quickly, and accept preorders and backorders when needed. With powerful analytics, you can make more precise forecasts. These solutions integrate smoothly with other apps you use for marketing, finance, fulfillment, and more. If Excel’s limitations have been a challenge before BFCM, expect those issues to worsen as demand surges during the BFCM rush.

That’s why the best next move would be to find the right inventory management software for your store. As a small Shopify business, you might need a cost-effective and user-friendly Shopify app like Fabrikatör!

🔧 Upgrade Your Inventory Game with Fabrikatör Before BFCM Starts!

Your small Shopify store has more potential than you realize! 💥 Fabrikatör provides robust inventory planning and control to unlock this potential and boost the growth of your small Shopify business! How? 🤔

With its easy-to-use interface, you can quickly adapt to Fabrikatör, while its advanced features ensure your store is professionally prepared for high demand. From automatized replenishment to detailed analytics, quick purchase orders to backorders and freight planning…  Fabrikatör is here to help you manage inventory efficiently and stay ahead during BFCM.

Do you have questions? You can experience all these features firsthand. Just spare 30 minutes and see Fabrikatör in action!

If your stock doesn’t arrive on time, you could run out of popular items or miss key sales opportunities. During BFCM, when demand is high, even minor delays can become major problems, making it hard to keep up with customer expectations and manage inventory effectively.