How Patchworks can help you this Black Friday

It might not be for another few months, but it’s time to start preparations for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM).

BFCM is one of the greatest opportunities for ecommerce companies to promote their business by taking advantage of the consumer’s attraction to good deals. In fact, last year, 108 million people said that they planned to shop on Black Friday in the US alone - so it’s an important day to capitalise on, with plenty of competition to beat.

To make the most out of BFCM, you need to have a solid strategy and infrastructure supporting the vastly increased traffic.

That’s where Patchworks comes in. Our powerful integration platform is purpose built and stress-tested for all sizes of ecommerce companies.

Here’s some of the things you should consider implementing for a successful BFCM, and how the Patchworks iPaaS can help.

Scalable order processing

Let’s say on a typical day you average around 100 orders. Your systems are likely built with that amount in mind, but imagine you have a particularly successful BFCM campaign and so have triple the traffic and orders as usual.

That’s where things start to go wrong. From slowing down your checkout portal to outright missed or duplicated orders, if you can’t process bulk amounts of data, you’ll risk losing potential customers forever.

You need to make sure your platform is built for scalability, and by partnering with Patchworks’ iPaaS, you do just that. To give some perspective, last BFCM we processed over 3.2m orders for hundreds of clients completely without a hitch.

Many of our clients, such as Lounge Underwear, even saw their most successful Black Friday sale yet.

That’s because the Patchworks platform is designed with bulk processing power, meaning no matter how many customers place orders through your website, we’ll ensure it gets from point to destination without any trouble.

To help out our clients, we even implement a BFCM code freeze so you don’t need to worry about our system going through updates or maintenance during your busiest period.

Seamless connections between systems

Running a business can be messy when you have so many different pieces of software, apps, and company-wide systems essential for the day-to-day running of your operation.

Whether that’s making sure your ecommerce platform communicates with your fulfilment system, or connecting your ERP with all the relevant data, you’ll need to make sure those data flows are seamlessly integrated.

Otherwise, you could end up sending incorrect and unreliable data between systems which negatively impacts your business.

We recommend an integration platform which isn’t just powerful, but also fast-acting. If you’ve only just started planning your BFCM strategy, you’ll want to be certain that your integrations will be up and running in time for the sales.

Patchworks’ no-code/low-code iPaaS allows all teams regardless of their technical know-how to plug-in-and-play their desired integrations

Unified stock pools

Does your business have multiple versions of your store based on area? Or do you run multiple different websites with some products which cross over?

You might not have noticed much of a problem with how you manage your stock as it stands, but peak trading periods act as a stress test which reveal the faults in your operation.

For example, perhaps one of your stores is vastly more popular than others. With a standard approach to stock control, you’ll likely have a set amount of inventory allocated to each store, meaning when one sells out, there’s not much you can do.

That’s where Patchworks’ Stockr solution comes in. By unifying the stock pool across all of your stores, you can automatically divert resources from websites with less traffic to your more popular ones.

By doing that, you effectively eliminate overselling by ensuring your busy stores can tap into a wider pool of stock. Plus, Stockr updates your storefront within milliseconds, so even if you do eventually sell out - you don’t need to worry about someone placing an order before the website updates.

But eliminating overselling isn’t the only benefit. You also combat underselling by being able to send stock from stores with low traffic to the places it’s needed most.

So if you run multiple websites and are worried about an influx of traffic on one, and a lack in another, Stockr is a great insurance tactic to take advantage of.

Expert and round-the-clock consultancy

Patchworks is all about making connections, whether that’s through our powerful integration platform, through the strong partnerships we maintain, or the close relationships we have with our clients.

We offer round-the-clock support for our clients across multiple time zones, whether you need insights about your connectors or urgent maintenance.

And with our low-code/no-code platform, anyone in your business regardless of technical expertise can troubleshoot issues which arise during peak sales periods. We’re always available around BFCM, so you don’t need to worry about your systems being overwhelmed.

If you’re interested in learning more about what Patchworks does, and how we can help you this Black Friday and Cyber Monday, get in touch through our website to speak to a member of our team.

You can also book a free demo of our platform.