Black Friday Comes to Canadian Shops

Friday's sale and the shoppers who compare

This Friday is Black Friday, which follows American Thanksgiving, with Cyber Monday on December 1. More Canadian retailers are running sales of their own this year rather than watch shoppers look south.

Shoppers in BC see American prices in the same browser as yours, and many will have your product page in one tab and an American competitor in the next.

A small online shop planning a weekend sale has two days left. The sale itself is the easy part; the weekend tests everything behind it.

What a sale weekend tests

• Stock, counted and matched to the numbers in the shop.
• Shipping, with dates a gift buyer can rely on.
• Prices, unmistakably in Canadian dollars.
• The checkout, from cart to confirmation email.
• The server, under a busier weekend than usual.
• People, to answer emails and pack orders.

The first is where most weekend trouble starts. Selling something that is not on the shelf means refunds, apologies and a customer who may not try the shop again.

Stock that matches the shelves

If the store and the online shop sell from the same shelves, the online counts drift a little every week. On an ordinary weekend nobody notices; on a sale weekend, items sell twice.

Count every sale item on Thursday and correct the numbers online. For items with only a few left, hold the stock back from the store or leave the item out of the sale.

Decide what an item shows when it sells out. A clear sold-out notice beats a product that accepts orders the shop cannot fill.

Shipping dates said plainly

Many Black Friday buyers are buying gifts. They need to know whether an order placed this weekend will arrive before Christmas, and few will dig through a shipping policy to find out.

Show the last order date for Christmas delivery in the cart and on each product page, by region if it differs. Take the dates from the carriers' holiday schedules, then allow for packing time.

Say when weekend orders ship. If nothing leaves before Monday afternoon, a buyer who reads that on Friday plans around it instead of emailing on Saturday to ask.

Prices in Canadian dollars, said twice

A shopper comparing tabs needs to know at a glance that your price is Canadian. Put Canadian dollars, or CAD, beside the price on product pages and again in the cart.

If you ship from Canada, say so near the price: no duty, brokerage or surprise charges at the door. Shoppers who have paid those fees on American orders look for that line.

Show when taxes are added, so the total at checkout matches what the buyer expected from the product page.

Sale prices that start and stop on time

Shop software usually lets a sale price switch on and off by itself at chosen times. Use that instead of editing hundreds of prices by hand at midnight, and give the times in Pacific time.

Test the schedule on one product today, and try any coupon code on a phone. Show a regular price beside the sale price only where the item really sold at that price.

A checkout that holds up

Buy something from the shop yourself with a real card, once from a phone and once from a computer, and follow each order through: payment, confirmation email, order record.

Check that the checkout's security certificate has not expired, and that payments reach the shop as orders even when a buyer closes the window early.

Ask the host whether the hosting plan can handle a busy weekend, and who answers the phone on Saturday. Send any sale email in batches if the host limits how fast mail goes out.

A worked example

A fabric store in a Vancouver suburb sells quilting cottons, fashion fabrics and notions from its shop floor, and a selection of its range online, cut to order by the metre.

Last year it ran no Black Friday sale, and several customers emailed asking whether it would match American fabric sites. This year it planned a weekend sale on quilting cottons.

The risk was in the stock. Online orders were cut from the same bolts as store sales, and the online counts, kept in metres, were rarely updated.

The sale bolts were measured on Thursday and moved to the back room, with their exact lengths entered online.

A line above every price now says the prices are in Canadian dollars, and that orders ship from BC with nothing to pay at the door.

Each product page gives the final day to order for Christmas delivery, and the sale prices are scheduled to start at 6 a.m. on Friday and end at 11:59 p.m. on Monday, Pacific time.

A shopper comparing the store with an American site now sees the currency and the delivery promise without hunting, and the store cannot sell the same metre twice.

After the weekend

On Tuesday, check every payment against an order, put prices back to normal if the schedule did not, and answer the emails that arrived over the weekend.

Note what sold, what sold out and what customers asked. Those notes start next year's plan, and the questions belong on the website.

The counter-case

A Black Friday sale does not suit every shop. A maker with limited handmade stock, or a shop whose margins cannot take a discount, may do better to stay out of it.

That is a reasonable choice, and customers who shop there for something other than price will not miss it.

But the rest of this list applies all December regardless. Clear shipping dates, Canadian dollar prices and a tested checkout matter to every holiday order, on sale or not.

Before Friday morning

1. Count the stock for every sale item.
2. Publish the shipping cut-off dates on product pages and in the cart.
3. Label every price as Canadian dollars.
4. Schedule the sale prices and test one.
5. Place a real order on a phone.
6. Ask the host about the weekend and who answers on Saturday.
7. Name who answers customer emails over the weekend.

Step one prevents the most expensive mistake of the weekend. Every oversold item becomes a refund and an apology, and teaches the buyer that the stock count was a guess.

How to say near the price and in the cart that the shop charges in Canadian dollars and adds nothing at the door is covered in telling Canadian shoppers there is no fee at the door.

Frequently asked questions

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