If you are asking today if your business is ready for a Black Friday Rush, it may already be a bit late to change your preparations for this year – but it’s still good to take a look.  Online businesses and brick and mortar businesses have a lot in common, they both are trying to capture that surge of traffic around the busiest shopping season of the year.

Black Friday got to this place of massive discounts and big glitzy promotions over the last 25+ years due to the basic supply and demand equation.   Since the early 1980’s the amount of brick and mortar retail floor space across the United States has increased on average 4% year over year, yet the population has only increased roughly 1% each year.  In short, there are more stores and items to shop than 25+ years ago on a per person basis (more supply and less demand).

 

According to Gallup, consumers estimate they will spend just $704 this holiday shopping season, on average. This is down from 2012, when the average consumer said they would spend $770.  All this is leading to more businesses competing for customer attention by using glitz, glamor and of course massive discount promotions to lure you in.  Black Friday is the big event of the year for many of these retailers – online, and brick, and mortar alike.

 

Online businesses are of course more recent to the ball game than the brick and mortar retail stores – but similarly compete for the attention of online buyers, and often have similar showcased promotions this time of year. Similar to brick and mortar retail stores, the online businesses have to fight that same supply and demand concept to get as many potential clients eye-balling their products and services versus their competitors – and its common to see deep discounts, promotions and low pricing to lure your attention.

Planned promotional strategy is the official term in business speak, but the reality for healthy well run businesses is wisely used discounting to bring new and existing clients to the store or web site.  It could be that $100 TV door-buster to get you in the store which in turn leads you to spend extra money on accessories and other high profit products (say special audio visual cables that have massive mark ups that help balance out the profit of selling that $100 TV door-buster).  Buy 1 get 1 free, 75% off black Friday discounts, super-sized upgrades, etc are all part of a well run business utilizing discounts to grab market attention.

Retail stores run into problems during the big rush for black Friday because literally there are more people than their stores can handle waiting at the doors, too busy a show-room floor for people to browse, and too few discount items (say that $100 TV at the door) to go to everyone who wants one – which can lead to customer dis-satisfaction and even hinder the overall goal which is for the business to make a profit by having the client browse all those high-mark up accessories next to the discounted items.

 

It’s crucial any business be ready for the potential rush.  Online businesses are no different, and online businesses have the extra ability to handle larger sudden volumes of transactions as long as their ecommerce system, web site and back end servers can handle the traffic spike during the busy season.  The last thing you want to do is be selling buy 1 get 1 free offers, and have your web site so slow that the consumer won’t stay in the shopping cart check out process to browse the profitable add-on items you are using to make up the profit margin.  It’s essential to plan ahead, have a fast and reliable web site, good back end cloud-based servers that can scale on demand and provide reliability when you need it most.  You don’t want to be caught with all your clients trapped outside the store with no way for them to get in and shop when it counts most, online or in-person at your retail location.

So if you are an online store, brick and mortar, or selling via online auction sites – plan ahead and be prepared for the Black Friday Rush.

 

 

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