Before Friday, count the sale stock and decide how the shop and website share it, name who packs and who answers, publish real service hours, warn your host, and decide what happens when items sell out.

Two days to go

Black Friday is the day after tomorrow. By now most stores know the offer, which products it covers and when the emails go out.

Less often settled is the store's side of the weekend: how many of each item there really are, who packs the orders, who answers the questions, and what happens when the best seller runs out at ten on Saturday morning.

Those decisions get made either way. Made today, they are a plan. Made on Saturday, they are an apology.

What the weekend depends on

The first can turn a good weekend into a week of apologies. An order taken for something that is not there has to be cancelled, refunded and explained, usually to someone buying a gift.

Count before Friday, not during

Count the sale items by hand today or tomorrow, and correct the numbers in the store's system. Counts drift over a year through breakages, returns shelved in the wrong place and sales entered twice.

Start with the items the emails and ads feature. They will sell fastest, and customers have been told about them by name.

Where a count is small, hold one or two back from the website. A small buffer absorbs the shop sale that nobody entered in time.

One shelf, two tills

A store selling in a shop and online is selling the same shelf twice. If the two systems do not update each other at once, the gap between them is where overselling happens.

Some stores connect the shop's point of sale to the online store, so every sale updates both. Others update the website by hand each evening, which works in an ordinary week and is a gamble in this one.

If the counts are updated by hand, split the sale stock instead: a fixed number for the website, the rest for the shop floor, and no borrowing between them until Monday.

Who is doing what

Write the weekend down as a schedule with names: who packs, who answers email and messages, who watches the order screen, and who can change a price or switch off a code.

Keep the person answering messages off the shop floor if you can. Questions about sizes, delivery and exchanges arrive all weekend, and each comes from somebody deciding whether to buy.

Give whoever is on duty the authority to act. A problem at nine on Saturday night cannot wait for the owner to get home.

Hours customers can see

Publish the answering hours for each day of the weekend where customers look, beside the phone number and on the contact page: phone, email, and whether anyone reads messages on Sunday.

Set an automatic email reply with the same hours and the next time a person will read the message. Switch off live chat for any hour nobody is watching it.

And say when weekend orders will ship, in dates. Orders placed from Friday to Sunday leave on Monday, if that is the plan.

A worked example

A men's clothing store on a downtown street runs an online store from its back room, with one person packing orders between customers.

Last year its Black Friday sale ran in the shop and online at once, and the website's stock was updated by hand each evening from the shop's till.

On Friday morning the shop sold the last medium of a popular wool overshirt. The website went on selling mediums until the evening update, and Monday was spent cancelling orders and writing apologies.

That weekend, questions about sizing waited until Tuesday, because the only person who answered them was on the shop floor.

This year the sale stock is split, with a fixed number of each size reserved for the website. One person handles online orders and messages on Friday and Saturday, with the hours posted on the site.

When something sells out

Decide now what a sold-out item does. A page left up and marked sold out keeps links from emails and searches working, and tells the customer the truth.

Offer an email when it returns only if a restock is genuinely coming, and a back order only with a date you can meet.

Then follow the sell-out wherever it was promoted: pause the ad, update the home page, and stop pointing new emails at it. A short list of substitutes, chosen in advance, turns a disappointment into a second choice.

The site in its busiest hours

A sale can bring more visitors in an hour than an ordinary day. Product pages can be served from a cache; the cart and checkout cannot, and that is where the load lands.

Tell whoever hosts and maintains the site the dates and the times the emails go out, and ask what the plan can handle. Ask today rather than on Friday.

Then stop changing the site. A plugin added or updated the night before a sale can break a checkout that has worked all year.

Monday morning

Plan the first working day after the weekend as carefully as the weekend: count the stock again, answer every message left over, and ship orders in the sequence they arrived.

Then note what ran out, what nobody bought and which questions came up most. That list is next year's preparation, written while it is fresh.

The counter-case

A store that sells only online, from one stock room, avoids the hardest problem here, since there is only one count to keep.

A shop running a small sale on a few items can manage with a count, a sign and an automatic reply.

But any store promising the same stock in two places, with more orders than one person can pack, needs these decisions made before Friday: count, split, staff, publish the hours, and settle what sold out means.

Before Friday

  1. Count every sale item by hand.
  2. Correct the counts in the store's system.
  3. Split the stock between shop and website.
  4. Name who packs and who answers.
  5. Publish service hours for each day.
  6. Tell your host the sale dates.
  7. Decide what sold-out pages say.

Step three prevents the costliest mistake of the weekend. Every order cancelled for missing stock means a refund, an apology and often a lost customer, and a split count stops it at the source.

Choosing the offer in the first place is covered in Black Friday without discounting everything.

Frequently asked questions

How do stores end up overselling?

When the shop and the website sell the same stock but update each other slowly. Items sold in the shop keep showing as available online until the counts catch up.

Should I hold stock back from the website?

For items with small counts, yes. A fixed split between shop and website, kept until Monday, prevents orders for stock that has already gone.

What should customers know about service hours?

When phone, email and messages will be answered on each day of the weekend, and when weekend orders will ship, in dates, on the site and in automatic replies.

What should happen when an item sells out?

Keep the page up and marked sold out, so links still work. Offer restock alerts or back orders only if they are real, and suggest alternatives.

Should I update the site before Black Friday?

Not in the last few days. Make changes earlier in the month, then leave the site alone, since a late update can break a checkout that worked all year.

What should I do on the Monday?

Count the stock again, answer every waiting message, ship orders in sequence, and write down what sold out and what customers asked, ready for next year.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Shop and website selling the same stock?

Talk to us before Friday. We will check your stock settings, sold-out pages and checkout.

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