Launch your knowledge

To help you prepare for a successful holiday sale, our support team gathered these tips.

We hope this guide prepares you for BFCM 2024 and highlights the most effective promotions, helps you catch any issues before they occur, and puts you in a position to get the most out of our apps to help you sell more.

Start early

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 recommend you prepare your sales now, test them regularly, and reach out to our support team by November 15th if you have any concerns. By reaching out early, this ensures we have the time to get your sale ready for your customers. Live chat support is also available for Ultimate Special Offers between 10 AM and 5 PM EST.

When writing in please begin your message with a detailed description of the issue you're facing. Including visual examples like screenshots or short videos will help us help you faster.

Test often, test like a customer

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

So when testing your offer, pretend you're seeing your shop for the first time. This can help catch issues with your setup before customers arrive. After each round of changes, take another moment to test again to ensure everything still works. Test early, test often, and especially after each big change you make to your shop.

Testing in an incognito window will give an idea of how the shop will work for a first-time visitor.

Once everything working well, consider implementing a freeze on any major changes to your shop during the week leading up to BFCM. This will help ensure there are no unpleasant surprises at the last minute.

Simplify

Overcomplicated offers or running many different offers at once is the most common cause of errors we encounter. When using a variety of offer types, 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 never confuse your customers.

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

BOGO and Bundle offers are easy 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 offered products and target those specifically rather than targeting "all collections". This will keep promotion items in one convenient place which makes them easier to manage.

Once you've streamlined your offers, simplify the shop too. Ajax carts and checkout shortcuts can skip the apps you rely on and cause customers to miss your offers. 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.

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.

And if you feel your offer is not visible enough, consider our app Pixelpop! There are lots of great features on our free plan to complement your BFCM promotions. Click here to learn more.

Browse our Ultimate Special Offers demo shop to get an idea of how each offer works on the storefront.

One app, one discount at a time

Each Shopify order is able to apply a single discount at a time. All of the offers you create in Ultimate Special Offers can be combined into that one discount slot to meet this requirement. 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 together at the same time.  Adding a new app can cause conflicts, so be sure to always duplicate your theme before installing one. If you always have a backup of your theme you can easily revert the shop to a working state if you notice any issues.

Keep a change log

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 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.

Get into the habit of making backups of your theme frequently. Unforeseen errors can suddenly appear and having a backup can often save you time and a big headache.