The countdown began for the most popular online shopping period worldwide! 🛍️ Black Friday starts on November 29th, and Cyber Monday starts on December 2nd in 2024. 📅  Did you start to prepare your eCommerce inventory for this upcoming shopping craze? If not, you should.

In 2023, only on Black Friday, 90.6 million US consumers made online purchases. Given the high volume of online sales, the earlier eCommerce businesses start preparing their inventory, the better. 📦  If you haven’t started yet, this playbook is what you need.

Since the BFCM period causes a worldwide surge in demand and, accordingly, stock issues, managing inventory during this time can be quite challenging for growing eCommerce stores. 🤔 That’s why good preparation, execution, and evaluation are essential. In this blog, we’ll clearly explain how to manage inventory during each stage: pre-, during- and post-BFCM. You can also download this playbook as a PDF. Let’s get started!

🔷 What to Do in the Pre-BFCM?

Some businesses tend to make inventory planning decisions out of fear of being out of stock. However, such decisions are made with limited information and cause even more stock issues. 🫣

🗞️ According to a BBC report, some companies that had faced stock shortages during Black Friday in previous years stocked up heavily in 2022 to avoid repeating the issue. However, while trying to eliminate the risk of running out of stock, they were overstocked. 🫤 After that, they wanted to clear the excess inventory, but then they had to offer deeper discounts, resulting in much lower profits than they would normally make. 📉

So yes, planning inventory is a bit more complicated than just saying, "Let's stock more—not sure how much, but more—and avoid being out of stock.’’

Good inventory planning relies on detailed and accurate analyses, setting strategies for potential issues, efficient supply chain, and using the right solution for it. Let's go step by step to create an efficient BFCM inventory plan together!

1️⃣ Leverage preorders for market insights & cash flow boost

It will be a long journey, so let’s start by offering preorders to gauge market demand. Customers start browsing products even before BFCM, so leveraging their preferences while planning your inventory seems like a great approach. Why? Predicting demand is challenging at such a peak time, and you need insights to stock up on the right products to maximize your profit and keep customers happy. So, you can start by allowing them to fill their shopping carts even before the products go on sale. 🛒 Plus, as customers will pay before you order products, the preorder sales can provide the cash flow you need, allowing you to invest more in marketing.

Even though not all product types are suitable, most holiday items, such as advent calendars, are perfect for leveraging preorders.

How does it work?

• Identify Key Products: Offer preorders for products you expect to be big sellers during BFCM. This way, you can focus on items that are likely to have higher demand based on past data and trends. 🛍️
• Set Up Preorders: Allow customers to reserve discounted products before they are officially available. This enables you to understand their preferences and estimated demand. 📦
• Analyze Preorder Data: Monitor preorder activity to understand which products are in high demand. Use this data to make more realistic inventory plans. 📊
• Place Purchase Orders: Use the insights gained from preorders to place accurate purchase orders with your suppliers. This ensures you have the right amount of stock to meet customer demand and helps generate cash flow before BFCM starts.

📌 Do you need more details for using preorder? You can find it here.

2️⃣ Use past insights to plan your inventory planning

As George Santayana once said:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" ⏳

Yes, exactly, and this also applies to the eCommerce inventory. That’s why, in the next step of planning BFCM inventory,  you need comprehensive analyses to understand your inventory's past and current status and make a better BFCM inventory plan.

• Firstly, you should ensure you have accurate past information and analysis. If you have a growing eCommerce business with a high number of products and use a manual solution like Excel, then you may need to double-check your data, as manual methods are prone to errors.

P.S. Using advanced, automated inventory planning software instead of Excel during busy periods like BFCM ensures data accuracy and saves time, providing the most optimal solution.

• Secondly, with ABC analysis, you can identify the most popular products in your store and those selling poorly. It is important to choose a strategy such as bundling that ensures popular products sell quickly while also accelerating the sales of slower-moving products.👚 Let’s assume that you have an apparel store where patterned t-shirts are popular, but solid-colored ones don’t sell as much. To boost sales, you could create a bundle including both types of t-shirts and offer them at a discount. This strategy will increase sales for the solid-colored shirts, improve inventory turnover, and reduce the risk of excess inventory.

📌 Looking for the best bundling apps on Shopify? Here are the best 5 bundle apps you can use during BFCM.

3️⃣ Fine-tune your stock levels with forecasting

With the help of detailed analysis and preorder insights, your store's stock levels have started to get into shape for the upcoming BFCM period. However, you can further refine your BFCM inventory plan by using sales forecasting at this step. Why? Let’s discuss further.

Inventory forecasting at this stage allows you to create a more future-focused inventory plan that includes your goals. With an advanced inventory management solution like Fabrikatör, you can accurately analyze the BFCM period 2023, set a growth rate for the upcoming season, and create a realistic inventory plan that aligns with actual demand and your goals.

Using a solution that accounts for seasonality, such as Fabrikatör, is crucial because relying on annual data alone isn’t efficient when planning for BFCM. Without considering seasonality, forecasting would be like planning your inventory for Christmas 🎁 by looking at year-round sales data for holiday decorations—unfocused and ineffective.

In addition, by incorporating seasonality into your analysis, you can determine the fluctuations and changes in demand and have a wider perspective of how demand is shaped during a specific period.

4️⃣ Be prepared for inventory crises

As you know, long journeys need good crisis management. So, in this step, you should figure out how to handle any potential BFCM inventory issues before the peak season kicks off. Here are the most common hurdles you should be prepared for:

Out of stock

By its nature, the Black Friday Cyber Monday season is a time when products can go out of stock due to high demand. However, unlike other times of the year, many eCommerce stores offer discounts, making it more likely for potential customers to choose other sellers when your store is out of stock.🚨 For products that are temporarily out of stock, you can accept backorders to continue taking customer orders. This way, while reducing the risk of losing customers, you can continue to generate cash flow. You can deliver the products to your customers when the stock is replenished.

📌 You can read How does backorder work? and Backorder Benefits for Your eCommerce Store for more detail.

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

Excess Stock

You might have excess stock at the end of the BFCM period due to overestimated stock levels, unexpected supply chain issues, or receiving more returns than anticipated. 📦📦📦 To avoid panicking and deeply discounting everything at the last minute, you should also plan how to handle this issue during your preparation process. To clear excess inventory, you can offer reasonable promotions on unsold products, sell them in bulk to wholesalers, or use a bundling strategy not just during the BFCM season but also after it.

Supply Chain Issues

Supply chain issues can arise from global factors, suppliers, or unexpected transportation problems. Working with reliable suppliers and maintaining good communication can help resolve these issues more quickly and easily. Therefore, discussing potential problems and actions with them during the planning phase can benefit your store before such a busy period.

5️⃣ Sync up with your suppliers

Your relationship with suppliers highly affects the efficiency of your inventory planning process. 🤝 Strong communication helps to make timely deliveries and maintain accurate stock levels. Besides, effective collaboration allows you to quickly respond to changes in demand.

Before the peak season begins, you should communicate with your suppliers and ensure they can deliver the right products at the right time. You can also review potential issues and determine how they can assist you in such situations.

Moreover, as you have already forecasted your BFCM demand, you can secure your stock levels by purchasing products earlier. These early deals with your suppliers also allow you to negotiate for better prices. 💸

Additionally, with effective freight planning ✈️, you can optimize your purchasing routes ahead of the peak season, ensuring you select the most cost-effective and efficient options to meet demand without unnecessary expenses.

6️⃣ Clear out dead stock with BFCM

The BFCM period is an opportunity to clear unsold or slow-moving inventory. You can do this by creating bundles that include dead stock items or positioning these items alongside popular best-sellers. This strategy helps reduce excess inventory while increasing the chances of these items being purchased.

7️⃣ Make sure you’ve got the right software to handle everything smoothly

The final and most important step in the planning journey is adopting reliable inventory management software. As BFCM is around the corner, you might be wondering how to accomplish every step we discussed in such a short time. That's where inventory planning software comes in.

The need for a good inventory management solution becomes even more critical during peak seasons because demand intensifies. Manual solutions such as Excel struggle to keep up because they are slower and prone to errors. With so many products moving in and out of stock rapidly, manual tracking can lead to delays in replenishment, inaccuracies in demand forecasting, and slower response times to issues.

On the other hand, advanced inventory management solutions like Fabrikatör are designed to handle the complexity and provide speed during peak times. With the help of their automatized structure, tracking and optimizing stock levels get easier. With real-time data, you can use the most up-to-date information when making inventory plans.

Long story short, using a successful inventory planning tool is crucial to efficiently follow all these steps and prepare your inventory for the BFCM period. Delaying the switch to an efficient inventory management solution because you think it will take a lot of time? With its 5/5-rated reliable customer support, transitioning to Fabrikatör is quick and easy. Only in 30 minutes, you can see Fabrikatör in action and learn more.

👉 Let’s review the necessary steps of pre-BFCM in inventory planning for you to make sure you’ve covered these essentials before BFCM kicks off:

🎉 Would you like to easily track the BFCM process with your team? With Fabrikatör’s operational checklist, you can do it easily.

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📦 Now, it's time to take action. The BFCM sales period is just as important as planning, and being quick and making the right decisions throughout its period is crucial. Here are the steps you should not miss during the BFCM sales period.

🔷 What to do during BFCM?

The day has come! After a careful and comprehensive planning period, it’s time to execute the plans and apply strategies efficiently. In this step, tracking inventory will become a bit more challenging because you will deal with the highest customer traffic of the year, and everything will move very quickly. To sustain customer satisfaction, you should efficiently manage this peak season because any delays or mistakes can lead to unhappy customers and lost sales. Keeping everything running smoothly will ensure that customers get what they want when they want it, helping to maintain their trust and loyalty. To help you successfully navigate this process, we've summarized what you need to do in 4 steps.

🔸Keep tabs on inventory in real-time

Inventory control requires extra attention, especially during busy and peak demand periods like BFCM, because everything happens quickly. 🤯 If you’re not monitoring inventory in real-time, it might be more difficult for you to spot sudden changes and react on time. For example, if a product suddenly becomes popular due to a viral social media post, you might not notice the spike in demand quickly enough to reorder stock. As a result, the product goes out of stock, and you may lose customers. 💔

If you have a limited variety and quantity of products, tracking your inventory in real-time and reordering when needed might not be that difficult. However, if you have a larger range of products and quantities, each product might have different suppliers and supply chain processes. Manual solutions like Excel struggle to handle this complexity effectively, especially during such a busy and chaotic time. 📉 You can use a more automatized inventory planning solution for replenishment, just like Fabrikatör. In this way, you can make sure your inventory assistant follows real-time data and gives you alerts for stock levels as needed. In this way, instead of stressing over reorder points, you can focus on sales opportunities and marketing strategies.

🔸 Manage backorders effectively

Handling the backorder process efficiently during BFCM is crucial because customers prefer timely fulfillment and may lose interest or become frustrated if they have to wait too long. That's why you need to fulfill back-ordered products quickly to maintain customer satisfaction and minimize potential loss of sales. To achieve this successfully, coordinate closely with suppliers to speed up the restocking process for back-ordered items.

In addition, using friendly language and communicating transparently with customers about back-order status helps you to build trust and reduces frustration while customers wait for their orders. 🛍️

Leveraging a platform like Klaviyo can significantly enhance your communication ability during backorder management. Klaviyo allows you to automate notifications and updates so customers receive real-time information about their orders and backorder status.

🔸 Keep Customer Support Running Smoothly

During peak season, customers will contact you with any issues they encounter. ⚠️ If you fail to respond due to the BFCM rush, they may choose not to shop from your eCommerce store again. You should regularly monitor your customer support channels and assist customers promptly whenever a problem arises to maintain their trust in your eCommerce store.

🔸 Handle logistics and fulfillment smoothly

Delays and problems stemming from logistics and fulfillment may be another frustration for your customers if not managed well. ⌛ The increased volume of orders during BFCM makes it more challenging to handle shipments efficiently, leading to longer wait times and dissatisfaction.

To prevent this, you should regularly check in with your warehouse to ensure they fulfill orders as promised. This helps maintain consistency in delivery and ensures customers receive their products on time.

👉 Here is a mini checklist to ensure you stay on top of every task during the busiest shopping days of the year:

You've successfully implemented your BFCM inventory plan and managed the execution process well, but there's still more to do. The insights you gain during this period are crucial for understanding your business needs and ensuring continued success. Let’s review the last steps you should take.

🔷 What to do after BFCM?

First things first: congratulate yourself and your team! 🎊 You’ve come a long way and successfully navigated another busy BFCM period. Now it’s time to reflect on your achievements and plan for the future.

🔹 Review your store’s post-sales performance

The BFCM period is indeed a busy and chaotic time, but it’s also a fantastic opportunity to evaluate your eCommerce store’s sales performance. Why? Because your business experiences the highest demand of the year, you interact with many more customers than usual, and you sometimes face unexpected issues. These challenges can actually provide valuable insights into how comprehensive, flexible, and robust your inventory planning is.

🔍 You can analyze your sales performance and inventory turnover using Fabrikatör’s custom inventory reports to gain these insights. By analyzing sales data, you can have a wider knowledge of product performance, customer behavior, and inventory levels. This will help you understand how well your store performed during BFCM and identify your strengths and areas for improvement.

👥 After evaluating the BFCM season and identifying what worked well and what did not, you should document these insights and share them with your team to improve future strategies. In this way, everyone can learn from this experience and enhance their performance accordingly in the next season.

🔹 Clear out excess stock with smart strategies

After BFCM, you may need to manage excess stock to free up space for new products and maintain optimal stock levels. You can clear out surplus inventory through strategies like:

• Bundling 🎁
• Offering extra promotions 💸
• Selling these products to wholesalers 🏷️
• Limited-time deals ⏳

You can create bundles by pairing best-selling products with unsold items to reduce excess stock. Using extra promotions and selling excess inventory to wholesalers helps decrease storage costs and maximize cash flow. Additionally, limited-time offers create urgency among customers, driving faster sales of excess inventory. With these strategies, you can minimize storage expenses and enhance your store’s profitability after a busy BFCM period.

🔹 Analyze customer feedback and support tickets

You should review the customer feedback and support tickets 📩 to discover the shortcomings of your eCommerce store’s inventory plan throughout the BFCM period. These insights will help you to make better inventory plans for peak times, create more flexible strategies, and prevent you from making the same mistakes.

🔹 Handle returns and refunds efficiently

After the BFCM season, you must also deal with returns and refunds quickly to maintain customer satisfaction. You should process returns quickly, update inventory records accurately, and issue refunds without delay. By efficiently managing returns, you can optimize stock levels,  keep customers happy, and set a positive tone for future interactions.

👉 Let’s wrap it up: Use this mini checklist to ensure everything is handled smoothly after BFCM.

‍👉 Pre-, during-, and after BFCM—all the steps you need for a successful peak season. Here’s the Inventory Planning Playbook for BFCM at a glance.

📌 Now that BFCM is over, you and your team know better whether the inventory planning tool or methods were sufficient or not. With the lessons learned during this peak period, you can refine your strategies and better prepare for the next one. 👀 As you do this, the importance of using an effective inventory planning solution cannot be overstated. But which software has all the features you need? 🤔 None other than Fabrikatör!✨

Next and Final Step: Efficient Inventory Plans with Fabrikatör 🚀

We’ve discussed all the steps you need to complete and features you should use for effective inventory planning while waiting for the upcoming BFCM. What do you think your eCommerce store needs the most? Forecasting, automated replenishment, backorders? 🤔 Well, you don’t have to choose because Fabrikatör offers all for you to maximize your sales on BFCM 2024. 🎊

Get ready for the upcoming BFCM season with Fabrikatör! 👇

• With analytics and comprehensive reports of Fabrikatör,  identify past sales changes, trends, and the most popular products in your store,
• Forecast BFCM demand to make more realistic plans,
• Apply a growth rate to your previous year's BFCM data and make a comprehensive and realistic inventory plan for the upcoming season,
• Plan your upcoming purchase orders, avoid last-minute rushes, and prevent unexpected delays that cause out of stock during the most busy shopping time of the year,
• Keep track of the inventory in real-time and automate the replenishment process to avoid stockout,
• Accept backorders when you’re temporarily out of stock during BFCM and keep earning revenue.

By using a more profitable inventory planning solution with minimized inventory issues, you can manage the BFCM period much more easily. In 30 minutes, you can successfully learn how to manage the BFCM period with Fabrikatör! 🚀 See Fabrikatör in action now!

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📌 Are you one of those who wish they had a PDF version to print and keep handy?

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