Handle Black Friday
Mayhem with Magento!

Count down for the biggest eCommerce retail event and the most chaotic sales weekend of the year has begun.
In 2018, the Amazon witnessed its biggest shopping day ever on Cyber Monday. It sold over 180 million items over the five days starting with Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.

While on the other hand Alibaba, China’s biggest online eCommerce company collected $30 billion on 11 November Singles day alone! The giant’s sales recorded a hit of $10 billion in just an hour and crossed $1 billion in just a minute. Gone are the days where people used to shop in excess by only looking at the low prices. Customers now have to be attracted to your online store and not just that but you have to please them with amazing customer experience.

By now, you must be all set with your stocks, pricing, marketing, etc., but you need to have a good strategy to compete with the chaos around you. In addition, here is all you need to do to add billions to your revenue in just a single day! To make this event a big hit for you as well, there are few aspects you need to focus on. Below are some crucial points discussed along with their solutions :

It’s All About Promotions:
Many retailers begin promoting their offers and discounts right from the beginning of the month also called Black November.
Five types of promotions that are necessary:

• Percentage-based offers
• Free-Shipping
• Buy-one-get-one
• Reward Points
• Quantity discounts

It is easy to offer these many promotions but at the same time, it is a tough time for your team to set these offers to different customers and products simultaneously.
Magento 2 offers you an amazing feature- Advanced Pricing. It comprises of options like grouped, special, tiered pricing. Additionally, it enables you to set a minimum advertised price (MAP) and a retail price as suggested by the manufacturer (MSRP). This makes your work easier to manage all your promotional offerings. It enables you to set different prices and offers to different customers on a timely basis.
For example, you want to offer a flat 50% off on only a set of items and only to a specific set of customers. Using Magento’s Advanced Pricing you just need to create a customer group and set the offer against it. It is just a matter of a few clicks and you are live with all you promotional discounts.

Peak Handling Capacity
You can always expect the best but you have to prepare for the worst. While preparing for the Black Friday you must be having a fair idea about the amount of traffic you draw to the website.
If your eCommerce platform is not capable of handling such high-load, you must definitely look for a platform that provides you with such capabilities.  Preparing for such a situation is always better than a website crash!
To avoid such terrific situations, Magento 2 helps you better handle peak order volume and outsized customer lists. It gives the following features that will never let your website turn down.

• Magento processes more orders per hour on the same hardware
• It offers near to instant server response times for catalog browsing
• Delivers fewer response times for cart and checkout pages
• Supports multiple administrative users on the backend simultaneously

Don’t go Stockless
Planning your stocks is necessary, you do not want to display a ‘Sorry we are out of Stock’ pop-up on the most awaited day. People face horrifying situations where they end up selling more when they do not have enough stock available. This happens due to the inefficiency in managing the inventory properly.
To avoid this disaster, Magento 2 provides you with an advanced warehouse management tool.  This helps you keep a track of multiple items in multiple warehouses on just a single admin panel.
All you want to know is stock available at the warehouse, stock to shipped and stock available for sale. In addition, Magento 2 provides you all this at just a glance!

On-Site Search Performance
Keeping your on-site search performance up to the mark is extremely essential as that will help the customer navigate through the website freely. Customers must find it easy to walk around different business units you offer and find the products they need.
It is believed that approximately 80% of the customers leave the website due to bad on-site search experience.
The Magento 2 advanced search plugin provides:

• Instant Search– Customers need not wait for the search result to appear. They can see the searching result instantly after they start typing only the first letter of the keywords in the search box.
• Autocomplete– This feature provides customers with autocompleting the word where it predicts the rest of the word.
• Maximum search results– The advanced search auto-displays 10 most-viewed or bestseller products, when the customer clicks on the search box.

Moreover, Magento 2 supports up to 10,000 SKUs and is compatible with the built-in Magento EE, Solr, and Elasticsearch. It provides you with many such amazing features, which will definitely optimize your on-site search performance.

Overall all Site Performance
No matter how well your website is doing, continuously improving the overall site performance is very important. In order to have the best Black Friday sale, you need to be well prepared for the high-load days. Giving the best experience is more important than offering discounts.
As you keep a check on the landing pages, you also have to focus on mobile devices. Not every customer must be using an iPhone or having a very good network. Therefore, the eCommerce platform that you use must be capable of providing similar kind experience on all devices.
Sometimes if your website runs slow is still tolerated by customers than looking at the ‘temporarily not available’ message.
Magento 2 offers you a faster application server response time to enable faster shopping experience that improves conversion rates and sales.

• Magento 2 processes up to 39% more orders per hour
• Provides up to 66% faster add-to-cart server response times
• Provide up to 51% faster end-to-end checkout times

Multiple Payment Options
‘One-click’ purchases are like a blessing for customers. Having fewer payment options create a barrier for the customer to make a purchase and you have to remove all such obstacles from your system before the big day arrives.
To avoid such problems you need to have an eCommerce platform that is compatible with a number of payment options.
Magento 2 is compatible with the following payment options:

• PayPal Express Checkout
• PayPal All-In-One Payment Solution
• PayPal Express
• Bank Transfer
• Pay On Delivery
• net Direct Post

Easy Checkout
Providing customers with easy checkout helps them in saving time and makes their shopping process easy. You need to provide customer satisfaction by converting checkout just in a few clicks to boost the revenue.
The One Page Checkout feature of Magento 2 delivers you with some significant features that help you ease your checkout process:

• Customizable according to your needs
• It converts a 4-step default checkout process to one page only
• Offers 5 layouts and 2 themes where you can select the design that perfectly matches your store.
• Every layout on the One Page Checkout is mobile responsive

Mobile-Friendly Buying
No matter how well you plan your marketing strategies, pricing, etc, but if your website is not mobile-friendly it won’t work wonders for you. The only thing can decrease your conversion rate is when people are unable to access your website or newsletter email on their mobiles.
PracticalEcommerce says the percentage of online shoppers using mobile devices during the Black Friday week increased to 54.3%, compared to 18.9% in 2017. That’s exactly how important the mobile-friendly website is!
It is not only about having a mobile-friendly website but every other marketing content that is sent to customers should be compatible with their mobile devices. That includes all the email campaigns, newsletters, messages and flash notifications, etc.
We at i95Dev offer Magento 2 an eCommerce platform that is been built with the ‘Mobile First’ approach.

• It is originally been designed to be responsive irrespective of the device used.
• Its UI gets easily adjusted to any screens
• Themes are applicable to any sizes and resolutions

Google now also evaluates the mobile site version first to rank, hence by using Magento 2 you can get a higher ranking of your website in the search engines.

Conclusion
So do you think your eCommerce website is ready for the year’s biggest eCommerce retail event?
In order to boost your revenue for the most awaited festive season sale of 2019, you need to keep a check on your eCommerce platform’s mobile-friendliness, attractive promotions, on-site search, and overall website performance. Also, focus on offering multiple payment options, easy checkout, and peak handling capacity. Make sure all the things are up to the mark, as you cannot afford even a single mistake this time.
i95Dev can help you successfully manage all the necessary aspects you need to focus on this season. Feel free to talk to our eCommerce Magento experts and request for a demo call today!