Launch your knowledge

Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is right around the corner. It's an exciting time with unique challenges and opportunities for ecommerce businesses of all sizes, and our app support team has years of experience guiding merchants through their biggest sales of the year. To help you prepare for a successful holiday sale, our frontline support team and developers gathered these tips and best practices to ensure you have all the tools you need.

We hope these tips prepare you for BFCM 2023 by highlighting the most effective promotions, helping you catch any issues before they occur, and putting you in a position to get the most out of our apps to help you sell more.

Start early

Our top tip from 2022 is the same for this year: it's never too early to prepare your promotions and offers for BFCM!

Preparing your offers now will give you the time you need to ensure:

• The steps to redeem your offer are clear and visible to your customers
• Everything works quickly to give customers the best possible experience while shopping
• Your offers are error-free

We're a mighty and well-equipped support team, but if you're having any issues leading up to BFCM we want you to know this is also our busiest time of the year. We recommend preparing your sales now, testing them regularly, and reaching out to our support team by November 17th if you have any concerns. Our support team is on hand during BFCM itself, but we'll be much busier then and turnaround times will be longer. By reaching out early, you can ensure we have the time we need to get you ready for success. Live chat support is also available for Ultimate Special Offers between 10 AM and 5 PM EST! When connecting with a live agent via chat, be sure to start with a detailed report of the issue you're facing and your shop's URL. Visual examples like screenshots always help too.

Test often, test like a customer

You know your shop, products, and sales better than anyone. However, your customers could be visiting your store for the first time. If a step for redeeming an offer isn't clear, customers might miss the promotion and you could miss out on a conversion or a larger sale.

When testing, pretend you're seeing your shop for the first time. This can help catch an issue with your app's setup, a technical issue in your shop you may have never noticed before, or other pitfalls a customer could experience. After each round of changes, take a moment to test again to ensure everything still works as well as it should. Test early, test often, and after each change! 

Try testing on an incognito window to get an idea of how the shop will work for a first-time visitor.

Consider having a friend, employee, or family member browse the shop for you too! Peek over their shoulder to see how they interact with your offers to catch any issues in time for us to help out.

Once everything is tested and working well, consider implementing a freeze on any major changes to your shop in the week leading up to BFCM (like adding new apps, changing theme settings, etc). This will help ensure there are no unpleasant surprises at the last minute.

Simplify

In our experience, complicated offers or running many different promotions at once is a common cause of errors. When using a variety of offer types, it's recommended to make sure the offers are targeting different products and collections. Ultimate Special Offers can run different types of offers at one time, but running simpler offers or one offer at a time will provide the most stability during a high volume period like BFCM.

Our simplest offer type is the Volume offer. It provides clear steps to customers that incentivize buying in higher quantities. Since the Volume offer is a tiered promotion, it provides the flexibility of multiple promotions at once in a single offer.

BOGO and Bundle offers are also simple to set up and perform well during busy sale periods. Keep them in mind if you feel the Volume offer isn't right for your sale.

Simplifying the list of trigger conditions for your offers is another great way to increase effectiveness. For example, create collections containing your trigger or offer products and target those rather than targeting "all collections". This will keep promotion items in one convenient place reducing the load on the app and creating a better browsing experience for customers. Use our Ultimate Special Offers demo shop to get an idea of how each offer works on the storefront!

Once you've streamlined your offers, simplify the shop itself wherever possible to ensure customers can easily find your promotions. Ajax carts and checkout shortcuts can skip the apps you rely on and cause customers to miss your offers, and only certain themes have Ajax carts that are compatible with Ultimate Special Offers. Also, consider pausing apps or customizations that don't drive sales to help your shop load as quickly as possible so you can give your customers a great experience.

Lastly, if you're using Shopify's multi-currency feature, make sure to check our guide on how to use multi-currency and Ultimate Special Offers together.

Get more visibility for your offers using Pixelpop! There are lots of great features on our free plan to complement your BFCM promotions. Click here to learn more.

One app, one discount at a time

Each Shopify transaction is able to apply a single discount at a time, and it's important to keep this in mind when setting up promotions. Promotions you create in Ultimate Special Offers can combine into that one discount to meet this requirement, and you can also set them up to combine with certain types of Shopify discount codes.

However, this limitation makes it impossible for different discount apps to work at the same time since they all must compete for that single spot the platform provides. Be sure to always duplicate your theme before installing and testing apps since they could cause conflicts with Ultimate Special Offers or other apps. If you always have a backup of your theme, you can easily revert the shop to a working state if you notice any issues.

If you know you've tried a few different discount apps and you find Ultimate Special Offers isn't performing properly, there's a good chance that incompatible legacy code from those apps remains in your theme. In this case, it's important to contact the support teams for those apps so they can safely remove their old code from your theme.

Keep a change log

It's not uncommon for our developers to see a lot of broken theme and app code show up in their queues at the last minute, and issues like this can keep a shop from running promotions and offers in time. Our recommendation this year is to keep a change log handy leading up to BFCM as you adjust settings, tweak your code, and install new apps.

By keeping notes about the changes you make in your shop, you can more easily backtrack if something suddenly stops working. Shopify's theme editor also provides a tool to allow you to revert files back to their previous states which is useful to keep in mind as you make changes.

Lastly, get into the habit of making backups of your theme frequently! Unforeseen errors can always come up in an online store, and having a backup can often save you time and a big headache.