The top BFCM challenges growing ecommerce companies need to be aware of

Did you know that during peak sales periods such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), ecommerce platforms receive around 300% more sales than during comparable days?

Whilst this might be manageable for large companies with plenty of resources, if you’re a company in your initial stages of growth you could run into some serious issues.

You can’t just ride the wave of growth and become complacent in your strategy. You need to make sure you’re supporting your foundations to ensure you don’t become overwhelmed.

Here’s some of the biggest challenges facing growing ecommerce companies during BFCM which you should be aware of.

Maintaining your website performance

Whether your customer is shopping on their phone or the laptop, they want to receive an uninterrupted and enjoyable experience.

But when you’re receiving record breaking volumes of traffic and sales, issues can arise with the performance of your website.

It could result in slow load speeds, which have the potential to push visitors away to your better-prepared competitors. Or, even worse, pages could crash and your customers will be faced with an error message whilst trying to add items to their cart or checkout.

A third of customers will never return to a merchant after just one bad experience, and one of the key goals of BFCM is to promote your brand and attract new customers.

One of the best ways to combat this is simply to run as many tests as possible in the run-up to a peak sales period. And this is assisted even further by integrating a powerful BI or analytics tool, which has easy access to all of your data and can help you figure out what you need to improve to supercharge your website’s performance just in time for BFCM.

Making sure you can handle bulk orders

Website and platform performance isn’t just about load speeds and glitches. It’s also about ensuring your order processing is up to scratch.

That 300% increase in orders during BFCM doesn’t just happen like magic. You need to effectively support your platform infrastructure so that all of that data can flow from point to destination seamlessly.

This is a common challenge which growing companies eventually need to face. Small businesses can typically handle the orders going through their platform with relative ease, using in-house teams to build their connections.

But as they grow, they realise their own integrations can’t handle rapid scale. That’s why our best piece of advice for companies experiencing this problem over BFCM is to consult with an integration provider ahead of time, so that you can connect your platform with systems such as your WMS, ERP, and CRM.

With the right provider, you can scale upwards and handle as many orders as you need.

Planning how to support your fulfilment operation

What’s your chosen fulfilment method? Do you handle warehouse management as well as delivery, or do you outsource certain steps to another company?

Perhaps you own or rent your own warehouse, and use an in-house warehouse management system to fulfil your orders. This might have worked well for you at the beginning when your amount of orders were easily taken care of.

However, you’ve probably already started transitioning to something more elaborate, or at least begun thinking about it.

Aligning your fulfilment process with your growth is crucial all year round, but it’s particularly important when you have a peak trading period such as BFCM coming up. For every one dollar gained through online sales, 18% of that goes towards fulfilment costs; that’s a huge amount, and if you’re not thinking carefully about how to make that process more efficient, you could end up spending even more on administration and support costs.

Cybersecurity and data protection

Making sure your operation complies with the law might not be the most exciting part of running a business, but it’s one of the most essential.

It’s not just about being compliant and diligent about obeying legal requirements. It’s also about your reputation and bottom line.

During BFCM, you’re opening the doors to a lot of new customers, and many of those will want to check the company they’re buying from adheres to GDPR laws and is transparent about how you protect their data.

Make sure you seek advice from legal experts far ahead of time so that, when the big weekend comes around, you can focus all of your efforts on driving profits instead of worrying about getting fined.

But there’s more you should do to protect your business than just comply with regulations. 60% of SMEs unfortunately close within just 6 months of falling victim to a cybersecurity attack, and hackers know that during peak trading periods your systems will be strained as it is, and your technical support team will have other priorities.

For a growing business, an attack during BFCM could spell doom. Busy periods like Black Friday are a great way to get your name out there and expand your profits even further, so a broken website and leaked data will ruin your reputation and potential.

By partnering with a data integration provider with a powerful platform, you can avoid this problem as well as other challenges you might face as a growing company.

For example, Patchworks uses a secure API and connectors to ensure data stays in the hands it’s intended for. And our platform is fully transparent, so our clients can clearly see where their data is going and its status in real-time.

If these challenges sound familiar to you, or you’re worried about another issue facing your company’s growth as we approach BFCM, get in touch with our sales team.

We can offer a free consultation and demonstration of our platform, and guide you through a range of ecommerce issues and solutions based on a decade of experience within the industry.