Black Friday: Your last minute preparations checklist
Web Hosting Blog
It’s now just 10 days to go until the year’s biggest sale event for many e-commerce sites! We hope that our previous blogs on preparing for Black Friday have been helpful in your preparations so far. If you would like to go through these again, you can find them here:
Planning for Black Friday: Part 1
Planning for Black Friday: Part 2
Securing your website for Black Friday
Which level of Server Management is right for your business?
With these in mind, today’s blog brings you the five best last minute preparations you can make before the big day on Friday 29th November.
Make your host aware of your plans
It’s absolutely invaluable to communicate your plans for Black Friday with your hosting provider. Send them details of the offers you are planning and your forecasts for increased visitors and site traffic. If it is part of your management package they may be able to perform additional monitoring on your site. And whatever level of management or product you have with your host, they should be more than happy to advise on the capabilities of your current setup and how it will handle your Black Friday plans.
Make sure your resources will handle your traffic
This is also one you may wish to consult with your hosting provider on. In short, make sure your server capabilities match your ambitions. If you’re planning a huge campaign and are spending lots on marketing, the last thing you want is for that spend and effort to go to waste. So you need to make sure your server can cope. Speak to your hosting provider about your plans and see what sort of tests they can run before hand for you.
Have a worst case scenario plan
If, after all your preparations, you find that the worst happens and you server has performance issues or goes down altogether, it will help you greatly to have had a plan for such a situation. Make sure you have up to date backups in place and all the latest security updates installed. If your hosting provider includes test restores as part of your management package it may help to have done one of these recently so that you can be sure of your site’s capabilities to get back online as quickly as possible.
Make sure you can keep your customers informed
Also, make sure you have channels in place to communicate with your customers effectively and make sure these are working as they should be. For anything from keeping your customers up to date with any site issues to dealing with increased queries and online orders, you need to make sure you can keep in touch with your customers simply and effectively. If you haven’t done so already, set yourself up a company Twitter account and give your customers the handle well in advance. This is a great place to post any updates should there be any issues or delays. And make sure you have a good process in place for contacting and keeping customers informed about their individual orders too.
Let your customers know what’s coming!
Use the next few days to let your customers know you’re taking part in the Black Friday sales. Make sure you use your site, social media accounts and newsletter capabilities over the next few days to really get your customers interested in what you will be offering.
We hope that whatever your business is planning for Black Friday that it is a success. Planning for the event and making sure your site is robust enough to cope is key. If you need any assistance, or you would like to speak to a hosting specialist about your current solution and your Black Friday plans, get in touch with us today.