How Patchworks can help you take advantage, and prepare for, BFCM trends

In our last article, we spent some time looking into and explaining some of the most recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) trends. With our platform processing an average of 42% more orders during this period, it’s extremely important to make sure you analyse these trends and figure out the best way to take advantage of them.

So where does Patchworks come in? We can offer plenty of advice, but sometimes you need to know about direct action you can take and what companies offer to help you carry through those decisions.

Here’s how Patchworks can help you prepare for some of the biggest trends and issues ahead of BFCM 2022.

Stock issues

You might be worried about how your business is going to handle its stock this BFCM. Perhaps you’ve heard horror stories about the major issues people faced last year, and want to make sure you’re well prepared to dampen the negative effects.

One thing to keep an eye on is overselling your products, especially during a time when you might be affected by stock shortages and issues with your supply chain. It’s one thing to run out of stock quickly, but it’s another problem when your website is still showing an item as available, leading to a customer purchasing it and you being unable to fulfil their order.

Patchworks offers a solution called Stockr, which unifies all of your storefronts and also updates stock within milliseconds to eliminate that issue. If you sell products across multiple stores or marketplaces, this is especially effective as unifying the stock pool allows you to distribute product where it’s needed most rather than allocating a set amount to each store.

The supply chain and fulfilment

But whilst Stockr is extremely effective for maximising profits and minimising losses, it’s also important to try to address problems at their core. Stock shortages tend to be a result of issues within the supply chain, and whilst some of these issues can be unavoidable - such as general shortages in rare materials, and closures and restrictions due to the pandemic - there are still things you can do to craft a more efficient fulfilment system.

That means you can build and prepare your infrastructure to withstand and work with problems at the very top of the supply chain.

By using a trusted, scalable, and powerful integration platform, you can connect your various fulfilment-related systems and solutions seamlessly so that you eliminate completely avoidable clogs and errors. Patchworks offers a self-serve, easy to understand platform which is purpose-built for ecommerce companies of all sizes, and with our portfolio of experienced fulfilment partners, you can rest assured that you’re in good hands.

The return to in-store shopping

In our trends and insights article, we noted that 77% of shoppers in 2021 visited a physical store during Black Friday. That’s indicative of a wider trend that, whilst ecommerce has retained much of the growth seen during the pandemic, people are also enjoying the chance to return to an in-person shopping experience.

Ecommerce companies need to make sure they don’t become complacent due to the growth they’ve seen over the last couple of years; hitting initial scale goals is only the beginning, you also need to work to maintain that growth.

Our advice is to ensure you’re taking advantage of your online platform. There’s things you can do and offer which physical stores can’t, and to capture and retain customers, you need to focus on those.

For example, more flexibility with payment options such as buy now, pay later (BNPL). As we enter a cost of living crisis, it’s valuable to be able to offer your customers ways of purchasing products they love without it taking a huge hit to their monthly income.

You can also implement a simple and streamlined returns system. If you carefully guide your customers through the process, it becomes far more convenient for them to just post an item back to you instead of going through the hassle of visiting their nearest physical store.

Whatever apps and systems you decide on to attempt to encourage people to shop online this Black Friday, you’ll need to make sure they’re properly integrated. The Patchworks platform has a library of best-of-breed tech partners to choose from, whether you’re looking for BNPL, a powerful returns system, or any other ecommerce solution.

Spreading the holiday shop over a longer period of time

One of the most important BFCM stats we think you should take note of is that 45% of people say they plan to do their shop in the run up to Black Friday, some as early as September.

That’s something the ecommerce industry is well-positioned to take advantage of. First of all, you can use this run-up as a testing ground for some of your BFCM strategies and tech to see how well they hold up, and how many customers they attract.

But, you can also cut ahead of the competition by offering eye-catching deals during this period which other companies might be waiting until the actual Black Friday weekend to put in place.

And with stock shortages and issues within the supply chain potentially being an issue this year as it was in 2021, spreading out your sale over a longer period can reduce overselling and a disappointing performance on BFCM.

Powerful integrations are of course a great way to drive growth if you decide to stretch out your holiday sales prior to Black Friday. Patchworks can help you quickly and reliably set up best-of-breed marketing, sales, and fulfilment systems to ensure you’re running at peak performance.

However, the main thing we’d like to highlight is the importance of analytics and monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs). This is especially important if you want to use the run-up period to BFCM as a test to see how effective your strategies will be on the big weekend.

Patchworks BI is a business intelligence platform specifically designed with ecommerce in mind, using our decades of experience within the industry to craft a solution capable of tackling all of your needs.

By using Patchworks BI’s real-time analytics to view how you perform prior to BFCM, you can effectively tweak and manage campaigns and strategies based on KPIs such as conversions, cart abandonment rates, and traffic from ads.

Get ready for Black Friday

If you’re looking for an integration, stock control, or BI solution to help you prepare for BFCM 2022, consider using Patchworks.

Our team of experts is always available to help you stay on top of all the latest ecommerce trends, from customer behaviours to issues in the supply chain.

For more information on any of the products mentioned above, contact us through our website for a free consultation and demo.