Ever since the pandemic changed the way consumers shop, eCommerce has been as much a part of Black Friday and Small Business Saturday as it has been to Cyber Monday. As a result, retailers across run specialty have extended campaigns to the virtual world to capitalize on the opportunity that presents itself online.
Here at the Run Free Project, the four day weekend after Thanksgiving is the most burden we face from a resource utilization perspective all year. Our platform is consistently handling hundreds of thousands of simultaneous sessions across 49 states stretching nearly 100 hours non-stop.
Over the years, we've noticed commonalities between the stores that perform best in this intense period, and those that don't. We've aggregated the best performers' top 5 "things you need to know" into this Black Friday Weekend Survival Guide in the hope that it will provide everyone with useful guidance as you prepare for the extended holiday shopping weekend.
1: Plan Ahead & Test Well Before Thanksgiving
If you're running any kind of sales, extending discount codes, or pumping campaigns over the holiday shopping weekend that are outside of the normal day-to-day scope of your eCommerce platform use, be sure to carefully test those discounts and other deals internally well in advance of go-time.
It is shockingly common for users who aren't intimately familiar with discount codes and other more sophisticated platform functions to misconfigure their good intentions into catastrophic logjams at the last minute, crippling their ability to take orders from eager customers on the big day.
2: Keep it Simple
There are two things run specialty retailers as a whole love to over-complicate when it comes to eCommerce:
Product category hierarchies and
The mechanics of discount codes.
I'm sorry, but it's true (and you're chuckling to yourself right now because you know it).
If your holiday discount structure is so complex that it requires a decoder ring or a PhD in Sanskrit to decipher, you're going to have a difficult time tracking performance and managing orders at scale. Your accountant will also develop a deep resentment towards your creativity, since reconciling returns or errors in the context of complex and dynamic discounts is exponentially more difficult by orders of magnitude in high volume situations. This is especially true for time-sensitive discounts that adjust by the hour or across blocks of hours. These configurations are, and have proven to be, recipes for maximum pain.
The easier it is to understand and track the discounts you're advertising, the more successful your big day will be.
3: Your Software's Going to Act Weird At Some Point
Each piece of software you use, including web-based platforms like the Run Free Project, process surges of transaction volume in wildly different ways because each is optimized for the operating environment it supports.
Under normal conditions, these differences are non-issues and invisible to the store admin's user experience. But when there's a ton of activity spanning a multitude of integrations at high speed, one of those software platforms is inevitably going to choke, causing errors and unexpected behaviors. Since they all connect back to Run Free, it's going to feel like it's us doing the choking, but in most cases it isn't. The most common of these are:
POS errors because we reach maximum allowed API calls in a given time frame (ahem... Lightspeed), which result in a small handful of orders here and there that have POS statuses stuck in "Processing" for extended periods (these will resolve on their own)
Shipping software periodically failing to automatically pick up an order because API call maximums have been reached, causing them to block data pushes from Run Free for a short period, during which the "skipped" order is placed
Delayed delivery times for admin notification emails and/or texts due to maxing out the number of allowed sends per second
We've engineered the Run Free Project to remain resilient in circumstances such as these, so there's nothing to worry about. However, you should understand how the system works well enough to feel confident continuing business-as-usual while the issues resolve themselves.
First, when an order is placed in Run Free, our platform takes the following steps to process it:
Check to ensure the POS has adequate inventory to fulfill the order
Run the payment through your payment provider and wait for an approval response
Submit the order to the POS to account for the sale and remove inventory
Send the invoice to the customer via email
Send notifications to store employees using your notification settings
Push the order to your 3rd party shipping software such as Shippo to queue it up for fulfillment (not all stores use 3rd party shipping software, so this step may not apply to you)
If the POS is overburdened by API calls, #3 could sit in line and wait for the POS to process it for longer than normal, which is what creates that "stuck in processing" anomaly as described above. However, all other steps continue normally, which means that even though the POS hasn't picked up the order yet, you've still received payment, so feel free to fulfill that order even if it's still in line for the POS to process. Don't worry, if an order made it to your Run Free orders page, payment was received, and it will make it through to your POS on its own.
If you use a 3rd party shipping integration such as Shippo, Ship Station, and ShippingEasy, there may be a moment in time where that 3rd party's API is being sent order information from Run Free so rapidly that it errors due to too many requests in too short of a time frame. Depending on that provider, it may not send that error back in a form Run Free can pass on to you. This may result in a small number of orders "not being pushed" to your shipping software during times of extremely high volume. There's no way to adjust for this programmatically, so be sure you check the orders in Run Free to be sure all have been pushed to your shipping software from time to time. If you find one that wasn't, simply click send to shipping software in Run Free and it'll pop right over.
4: Remember who is helping you
Sometimes in a panic, users will seek help from the Run Free Project support team on software that we didn't build or have any access to whatsoever. Most of the time, we'll Google your problem and send what we find, but when we're swamped, it's hard to take the time to try to learn another company's platform in an attempt to help.
Remember that the Run Free support team is excited to help you with all your eCommerce needs, but our scope of visibility ends at the outside edge of our software. If you need help with other software platforms for things like printing a shipping label in Shippo, running a report in your POS, or validating tax rates for a zip code in TaxJar, you should contact the support team for that platform before contacting us. You'll experience a faster time to resolution, a lot less frustration with our inability to assist, and you'll help free up our staff's time to assist stores with their Run Free-specific questions.
5: Use All the Tools at Your Disposal
Because everyone across the run specialty industry and retail in general is more likely to be slower to respond to support requests on high volume holidays, it's important to remember you have lots of tools at your disposal to self-diagnose and troubleshoot your own issue before contacting support for help. A few examples are:
The Run Free Project has thousands of support articles with step-by-step instructions for all platform functionality, just search for the problem you have and it'll most likely find you a solution.
YouTube is the most popular search engine in the world. It's also how I learned the Electric Slide for a wedding I attended last year. Coincidentally, the Run Free Project YouTube channel has a wealth of information to help you do everything from edit images and create pages to troubleshooting loyalty points calculations and Strava integrations. Check it out!
Google is the go-to search engine for most people in the present day. It's also the place that 97% of consumers discover local businesses online. Don't be afraid to Google your problems to self-diagnose and treat. You'd be surprised by the wealth of information that presents itself on even the most obscure topics.
Thank you for being a part of the Run Free Project family. Together, we'll have the best Black Friday weekend on record. Godspeed and break a leg!