Our app support team has been through our fair share of Black Fridays. Although we’re a small team, our collective experience gives us a unique perspective on what to prepare for even in these unprecedented times. We’re seasoned veterans and we like to think we’ve seen it all, but each year brings new surprises and learning experiences both for us and our merchants.
We all put our heads together and discussed our past experiences working at a high volume over Black Friday Cyber Monday, and we came up with some tips from our perspective on how to run the most successful — and headache free — promotion possible.
1. Start early
This is unanimously the support team’s biggest tip: start early, plan ahead. By getting an early start on setting up your Black Friday Cyber Monday promotions, you can catch potential issues sooner, giving us more time to help you get set up. We’re a small but mighty team, but if you’re having issues in the days leading up to Black Friday Cyber Monday when we’re operating at our highest volume, it’s possible we won’t be able to get to your ticket in time.
Every shop is different so there’s no specific date when you need to start building your promotions. Our rule of thumb: start no later than the beginning of November, and test every week.
Get started now! Set up a promotion, test it out from a customer’s perspective, predict what kinds of issues they could run into, and get in touch with us early on so we have time to help you out.
2. Keep it simple
There are a lot of tips and tricks out there about how to increase your conversions over Black Friday Cyber Monday, but the most important thing is that your promotions work. In our experience, complicated setups or running a lot of different promotions at once is a major cause for errors.
Volume offers from Ultimate Special Offers are a great way of running a dynamic multi-tiered promotion, incentivizing larger orders and boosting your average order value without needing to run multiple offers at once.
Keep it simple. If you are looking for a more complex offer setup, this is where it’s extra important to start early! Start playing around, get your offers set up, and test them out. If you notice issues, get in touch with us.
3. Test often
A Shopify store is a complex thing, and a lot can change in a small amount of time. If you set up all your Black Friday Cyber Monday promotions two months in advance and then leave them alone, small changes elsewhere in your Shopify admin could affect your offers and cause potential problems.
To keep on top this, regularly test your offers once they’re set up and look for any fail points. Place yourself in your customers’ shoes and browse your shop from a visitor’s perspective. Look for potential exploits, fail points, and anything that might discourage the customer from placing an order.
Make sure to run a final test of your Black Friday Cyber Monday promotions on November 26.
Set a reminder on your phone, and run a routine test of your BFCM promotions once a week!
4. One app at a time
While it’s important test out different options to find the app that works best for your business, install code from different discount apps can cause issues in your theme when they’re running at the same time.
Before installing a new app, make a backup of your theme.
If you’ve tested out a discount app and it didn’t work out, you'll likely want to look for another. Before trying out any other apps, make sure you contact the old app’s support team to have them safely remove any leftover code before trying out another app. Leftover code from other apps is an extremely common cause of issues that we see, and most app developers will be happy to help uninstall their code safely.
Testing out different apps early on will give you time to make the right decision and ensure that no conflicting code is lingering in your theme.
If you're using Ultimate Special Offers and run into a conflict with a third party app, you'll need to reach out to the app developer so they can safely remove their code. It's not safe for us to remove code from third party apps.
When testing different apps, test one at a time and make sure leftover code is removed manually when you uninstall an app! Stick to one discount app for your Black Friday Cyber Monday promotions.