Black Friday Tips For Your Online Marketplace

Black Friday & Cyber Monday - two core dates on the ecommerce calendar. On par with Christmas, if you are an ecommerce store or marketplace, then you are very much aware of these two days and how lucrative they can be but also, busy.

Both in November, these two dates can help transform the fortunes of your marketplace, setting you up nicely leading up to Christmas and into the new year. For this reason, it is important to get your strategy right so you can make the most of your increased traffic - from increasing traffic to your site to most importantly, getting as many conversions and sales as you possibly can.

Black Friday or Cyber Monday may be the first time a potential customer visits your marketplace so first impressions matter, a poor experience, anywhere along the process from navigation to transaction may turn them away for good.

Producing the best experience and the best deals will on these two days go a long way to converting the first visit to your marketplace into a long time and repeat customer.

Strategy & Margins

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the perfect examples of high competition - in most cases, competition will be so high that you will have to really offer great value to your customers in order to entice them to visit your site.

You may decide that, in order to get traffic, you will have to offer select products at prices that may eat heavily in your margin. It’s important to analyze where you could perhaps trim back your margin and attempt to match this with products that are in high demand. This will likely be something you will have to discuss with your vendors as well.

This approach is based on the idea that due to the sheer volume of sales across your entire marketplace, you’ll end up making your discounts back. Some customers may order several items, covering the costs of reducing your margin on some individual products.

Aside from the actual products themselves, you may decide to change your shipping policy, like offering free shipping on certain items or reducing shipping fees. These are all methods you can use to attract customers and ensure that your Black Friday/Cyber Monday event is a profitable one for you.

Good House-keeping

User UX can be vital when it comes to big events like Black Friday/Cyber Monday - how easy customers find it to search for the products they want is a core part of making your event succeed.

Look at metrics like your bounce rate to try and figure out which pages need to be improved - on such a busy day, customers may visit your site but only give you a short window of time in terms of whether they can find what they are looking for quickly.

Therefore, it’s recommended that you ensure that your site is easy to navigate, intuitive to use, mobile-friendly, and fast loading - from search all the way to checkout. This is generally a good point all year round but is especially relevant on days like Black Friday.

Advertising & Promotion

To start off, you have to let your customers know that you are having a Black Friday/Cyber Monday event - after all, you can have all the deals in the world but if nobody knows, it doesn't matter.

It’s a good idea to start promoting your event and examples of the deals on offer at least two weeks before the date - this allows enough customers to become aware of your event and to plan accordingly. You can do this via several different mediums like social media posts, notices on your site as well as mentioning your event on your monthly newsletter if you have one - here, you could even create a promo code which could give an extra discount to those who use it.

If you are lucky enough to have brand ambassadors or influencers who support your marketplace, it’s a great idea to use them to help promote your event by mentioning your marketplace and giving a promo code for discounts on particular products.

Managing it All

So you’ve managed to advertise and promote your Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, worked out an arrangement with your vendors regarding margins, and make sure your marketplace is an oasis in a desert of poor UX, what next?

You need a system that can help you manage all the logistics of each of your orders. On a busy day like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you might find yourself spinning many different plates so it is important to have something in place which can help you keep track of everything - What is that solution? Onport.

With Onport, you can help streamline and automate your order routing, inventory, shipping, and payment operations. Quickly and accurately relay orders back to vendors for the fulfillment, easily organize the best possible shipping option, automate payments back to your vendors and keep a watchful eye on your product catalog and inventory.

Examples

For instance, with orders coming in from all directions, you need a solution like Onport to intelligently route those orders back to the appropriate vendor, ensuring to reduce any possible mistakes or confusion and overall, just helping to keep things running smoothly.

Worrying about your shipping? Well, thanks to Onport, you no longer have to. You can use Onport to help generate shipping labels with any carrier using 3rd party carrier services such as Shippo, Shipstation and Shippypro just to name a few. It is also possible to provide labels to your vendors to ship the order directly.

For your shipping rates, you can blend shipping rates at checkout considering parameters such as Origin, Destination, # items, Vendors involved in the order, Order value, and Thresholds.

Onport allows you to stay on top of all your marketplace processes and can help ensure that your Black Friday and Cyber Monday events go off without a hitch.

Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Onport is here to help.

Onport is an ecommerce marketplace and dropshipping platform enabling companies to centralize the core areas of backend marketplace dropshipping operations using next-generation composable technology - inventory syncing, order routing, shipping workflows, payment automation, and returns management.

The Onport Platform can accommodate both those seeking an out-of-the-box solution and, through an API with +3.000 endpoints, those who require a more flexible implementation.

“With Onport, we were able to launch in less than three months, which we just couldn’t have done, had we built the system ourselves.”

Frank A. Ricciardi | Founder & CEO at Maavee

From growing SMBs to well-established enterprise-level companies, its composable and adaptive infrastructure was designed to be a reliable partner for the growth of any company operating in the e-commerce marketplace and dropshipping space.

Over 200+ companies in the e-commerce space are future-proofing their business with a solution trusted by brands such as Stadium Goods, Cupra, Ivalo, and Naduvi.