Mastering Black Friday: Your Essential Shopify Store Prep Checklist

What's up guys, Trevor here with e-commerce paradise. Today I'm going to give you a Black Friday, Cyber Monday Shopify store prep checklist.

So if you have a Shopify store already, this is going to be helpful for you because you'll be needing to prepare your store for the holidays. And the holidays are coming up in about a week and a half as of the recording today, which is I believe the 21st or the 20th. Anyways, so yeah, it's really important that you prepare a few certain things for your store. With high-ticket dropshipping, luckily, your brands will have already done most of the work.

You just have to do the work of marketing and advertising now. And the way that we do things, if you follow along, we just set up evergreen ads, shopping ads with Google. So advertising is pretty much done for you by Google, thankfully. You just have to do a little bit of maintenance every day. But the marketing can be updated on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. So there's a bunch of different things you can do. And I would recommend, first and foremost, checking your margins.

If you have margin minimums like I do, where you work with suppliers that only offer a minimum of 20% after shipping fees, then you can afford usually to do about 10% Black Friday sale. And everything else is kind of like an evergreen 5% sale. That's pretty much what I normally do. And of course, it really just depends on your niche. If your margins are a little bit lower, you'll want to do maybe like a $20 or $50 sale or something like that.

$100 sale, whatever. But if your margins are quite a bit higher, then you might even consider doing more, like 20% or 30% or 40% off. It really just depends on what your margins are. So first of all, check your margins. And margins can change by supplier. They can change by products. So some suppliers can have products that range from 10% all the way up to 50% margins. Some suppliers will offer across the board 30% margins on all their products.

Some suppliers have immense catalogs. And so, of course, margins are going to change. And some suppliers charge shipping and some don't. So the ones that charge shipping separately, of course, margins are going to change based on where your customer is.

So if your supplier has a warehouse in California, but your customer is in New York, and they order and you drop ship to New York, well, of course, you're going to pay more in shipping, so your margin is going to be less because you're still offering free shipping, and the price doesn't change. Now, what I used to do back in the day is I used to have separate variants for shipping, like general shipping regions in the U.S., because I realized this.

And then my competition, they were actually charging shipping specifically on their websites. And I had very little competition back then. So I was able to set up shipping region variants and charge more by shipping region. So if somebody ordered and they chose a region like California, but their shipping address is in New York, and they tried to play it off like, oh, sorry, I didn't see it, I would still let it slide.

But most of the people were very honest, and they would choose the correct shipping region, and then they would pay the correct price for that. So that was one way that I dealt with it. It really just depends on you. And what I usually do nowadays is I just eat it. I just want to stay competitive because there's a lot more competition these days and people are willing to just eat it. Eat the margin, basically, in order to get the sale.

Anyway, let's get into it. You just want to know your margins first, and then you want to come up with your dollar or percent that you're going to offer off. Usually the minimum that people are looking for on Black Friday is 10% off. If you can offer more than that, great. If you want to offer a tiered percentage off based on the dollar amount sold, or you want to offer percents off based on the brands or specific SKUs, that kind of stuff is great too.

If you have a really old store, you'll have a lot of data based on your best sellers. And I would just recommend that you make specific sales based on bestsellers and check the margins and offer as much as you possibly can and just consistently check your competition going into the holidays so that you know that you're either matching them or beating their offer. Okay.

One thing to also keep in mind is if your competition is offering more than just percentage off, like free gifts, you might want to offer more of a percentage off than them just to kind of, you know, get beyond that free gift bundle that they're offering people. Okay. So just watch out for that as well. And you might even consider that doing that too. It's just offering a free gift bundle along with percentage off.

It's kind of an evergreen thing actually. You could bake that into your product description or make a graphic and put it in your images or even have it as like an add-on separately and put it next to the product and make it go to carts like that. But anyway, so just kind of figure out what your percentage off and what your offer is going to be in general. You want to always list it on your website header.

Usually in your theme settings, if you're using like out of the sandbox theme, like Empire Theme or Superstore or something like that, one of the ones we recommend. And by the way, if you don't know Out of the Sandbox, they make amazing Shopify themes, and I highly recommend using them. You can check them out at ecommerceparadise.com slash outofthesandbox.

I use their themes. They're really, really good, responsive, fast-loading, and professional-looking and working themes that have tons of built-in features. So definitely check out Out of the Sandbox themes. They have a built-in website header banner on those themes, and you can add it there. I would recommend making the color black with white text just because it's a Black Friday sale.

And then also I would recommend putting a little note on your product page and your cart page separately besides the banner somewhere within it that says the sale. And so there's apps that can do this for you. You can code it into your website manually just knowing some HTML and CSS. And then, yeah, I would definitely just recommend making it stand out.

That's the main thing it's like hey no matter what you want to make sure that people see that, You can also set up, and definitely do this, set up email broadcasts, email marketing broadcasts. You should be using Klaviyo if you're using Shopify. Klaviyo is the email tool that I use and most Shopify store sellers use. You can check them out if you aren't already at ecommerceparities.com.

So definitely set up some broadcasts and get a banner made for your homepage, like a graphic and a homepage banner promoting the sale. And you can get multiple banners and multiple graphics made by different brands or by best-selling products and things like that too. But you should set up these email broadcasts to promote those things.

And then also, what I would do is I would reach out to suppliers and I would ask all your suppliers which ones are offering discounted pricing and then make specific banner and marketing things for those particular suppliers and those particular SKUs just because those are the ones that are more likely to sell.

If they're normally priced a lot higher and they're priced lower for the holiday season, people are definitely more likely to buy those specific products. Another thing to watch out for is your suppliers are often going to run out of inventory because of the holiday sales season, and big competitors are going to buy inventory going into the holidays. So just keep that in mind.

Consistently be checking your stock sheets so that whenever you get sales calls, you can let people know right away, hey, this one's not in stock right now, that kind of thing. It's up to you whether you want to keep the stock updated on your website or not. There is a great Google shopping app feed that I use called Symprosis. And most high-tickets dropshipping store owners are using this now. But Symprosis can tie into a specific collection on your store.

And in that collection, you can choose to make a filter where products that have an inventory of zero are not added to the collection or products that have an inventory of one are added to the collection, one or higher. So it's up to you. If you add that filter, that means that it will remove products from your feed that are out of stock. If you have an older store and just tons of traffic coming from Google Shopping ads to particular SKUs, then those just happen to be out of stock.

It's like, you know, it's basically wasting your ad spend if you're driving traffic to that. But it is a little bit more to manage, so it is up to you whether you really want to do that or not. But I would just recommend checking your Google Shopping ads, checking your top ad spend products, and just making sure that they're actually in stock. Because if they're not in stock, chances are that you're just going to be driving a ton of traffic to your website that's not going to convert.

Or it will convert but then the orders will get cancelled and in niches where the actual the variants that are out of stock are like just color based variants it's the most annoying thing but people will order a certain color of a product and really be stuck on that color and another color is available but it's like they just don't want that color they gotta have the color that they wanted and it is what it is so you just gotta deal with it unfortunately and.

I would recommend definitely setting up your store to not capture orders as soon as they come in, especially in the holiday season when inventory is low. Just make it so that it's authorized, and once you check stock and verify stock, then you capture. Because if you capture payment and then have to refund, you're not going to get refunded the merchant processing fees by Shopify Payments or PayPal. So just keep that in mind. This changed back, I believe, in 2018 or 2019 or something like that.

All the merchant processors, almost all of them are doing that now.

So definitely just authorize throughout the holiday season because inventory levels go crazy once the suppliers get lots of inventory back in stock then you can consider changing it back to auto capture so that it's easier to manage cash flow, because for instance if you get an order and then it takes a while for you to verify inventory and then all that then obviously cash flow is going to be an issue because your supplier is going to charge your card right away and then

you're not actually going to get that money deposited to your checking account for another few days after that, depending on how your stuff is set up. So it's just easier to do the auto capture when inventory is in stock.

But it's very difficult to do automated inventory at these stores because most suppliers don't have any kind of automated inventory set up on their end of it. If your suppliers do and are tied into some sort of automated inventory software, or you can somehow tie directly to them using a software or whatever integration, then that's great. But usually you have to do it manually and I like in the past would just have a VA do it. But again, it takes a lot of time.

So it's up to you whether you want to actually, you know, do that or not. But it might be worth it, especially just for like top selling or like top ad spend brands throughout the holiday season with inventory as well. You might just want to do it for that. All right, so let's see, next one. Definitely make sure if you have a VA that's taking sales calls, just make sure that they're aware of the sale and that they're just letting everybody know that calls, that, hey, we have a limited time sale.

It's going to end on this specific date at this specific time. It's for this much off. Normally, we don't have this sale going on, so you want to take advantage of this sooner. You'll save more money if you make your decision today. And just tell them to try to close sales as much as possible.

And again, just to reiterate, Make sure that you don't just put the sale on your site, but you also say that it's going to end soon or that it's ending on a specific date and a specific time because that usually drives people's urgency, to place the order then there. Next thing you can do that I would recommend, especially if you have a big social media following, is create social media posts.

I use an app called Outfy, O-U-T-F-Y. It's a Shopify app, and they automatically create social media posts.

And it's not that expensive and they're not the best but they're decent and they make promotional posts and you can set up promotions for certain holidays like Black Friday for instance and then it'll create posts for you so definitely check that out if you're using something else just make sure you're creating social media posts so people can see it if they're following you.

And that's about it guys so just make sure your site's ready for it Black Friday's a big sales holiday there's lots of money to be made you've got to make sure you're competitive and you're letting people know about the sale And then the inventory stuff is kind of a pain in the butt, but you got to do it. And just kind of like they say, the 80-20 rule, where 20% of your work will get 80% of the work done. Just make sure you focus on those top ad spend products as far as inventory updates go.

And then just authorize so that if you have any inventory issues, they're not going to be a loss when the orders come in. And then, of course, if there is orders that come in that are out of stock, always push for the back order. You can always say, hey, listen, we'll give you, you can just wait till a certain day, we'll give you an extra percent off to wait, that kind of thing, or a free gift, give them some incentive, and then, you know, hopefully they'll be willing to wait.

And people sometimes are willing to wait for the thing that they want. And another thing you can say to people is that you're not going to be able to find it in stock anywhere. Like all the dealers get it from the same source. You know, it's going to be very highly unlikely that you're going to find this one before it comes back into stock.

So if you just place the order with us and keep it with us, we'll give you a percent off, we'll give you a free gift, and we'll make sure that it's shipped out as soon as it comes in, that yours is reserved. And then with the supplier, usually you can place the order ahead of time with them, but if not, you can let them know, hey, we've told the customer that theirs is reserved, so as soon as it's back in stock, please let us know so we can get this ordered with you guys.

So some suppliers accept back orders, some don't, but you just kind of have to work with it.

And then lastly, if you can't afford it, if you have some reserves of cash or credit lines or whatever that you can access, I would definitely recommend buying some inventory of the best-selling products from your suppliers. And you don't even have to ship them to your own warehouse or anything. You can just buy the inventory, have them hold your inventory aside, and then when you get those orders, they'll ship those products out for you.

I'm always weary about this, of course because that means that they basically are writing you an iou that you don't actually have control over that inventory like they could sell it somewhere else and still screw you over but since you know you have you should have a decent relationship with the suppliers that you do this with so i would recommend like only doing it with suppliers that you have a long-standing relationship that you have trust

built in you know where you trust them they trust you that kind of thing so that you buy the inventory they hold it for you and then they ship it out, and then they just let everybody else know that it's out of stock so yeah that's pretty much it guys good luck with black friday if you guys have any questions want to get involved in the community definitely check it out ecommerceparadise.com i have free offers up there as well as a course and community and done for you

services and lots of resources as well as partner offers so check it out ecommerceparadise.com and i'll see you guys out there.