How to Prepare for Black Friday (and the Festive Season Rush)

[tranguyen]

The festive season brings in lots of business — which is mostly a good thing — but also comes with some challenges, from long queues, inventory management to tired employees, just to name a few. 

If you’re in the midst of preparing for a busy Black Friday (and the Festive Season rush), we’d like to help. Our team has put together a quick guide on trends to look out for and tips on how you can prepare your business for this peak shopping day.

Manage the crowds with Square

Long queues — nobody likes them and they are not a great customer experience. So what can you do about it? Here are a couple of tips: 

• Use Team Management to allow more staff to take payments on either side of the counter. Free and paid plans for Team Management are available as well as a 30-day free trial.
• Offer multiple ways to pay — that can be getting additional hardware, or creating QR code so customers can scan and pay for items.
• For Food and Beverage sellers, create QR codes with Square Online to allow your customers to view the menu and order online, which will help cut down the time spent at the register.

Spread the word on social media

People are shopping on social media more than ever. Instagram, TikTok or Facebook isn’t just a useful medium to interact with customers — they can make shopping easier:

• Use Instagram Shopping to highlight new products or special items for sale and sell them directly from shoppers’ feeds.
• Let your customers know about any deals or promotions you have and changes to your business hours on your social channels. You can also use marketing tools to stay connected with your customers (and don’t forget to take advantage of the free 30-day trial of Square Marketing).
• If you’re concerned about getting an influx of customers all at once, consider extending your promotions for longer to space out traffic. Use email and in-store marketing to make sure customers know you’ll honour promotional pricing even after Black Friday. 📅

New for US sellers: Learn about Tap to Pay on iPhone. Accept contactless payments directly from your iPhone, with no additional hardware required. 🇺🇸

 

Keep customers coming back

Get into the festive spirit by giving gifts to your loyal customers and to keep your new customers from coming back:

• Black Friday is an ideal opportunity to thank your loyal customers for being part of your journey with an exclusive surprise deal, such as an extra discount.
• Likely to have winter weather? Offer free coffee and hot chocolate for your customers in-store to create an inviting and memorable environment. ☕
• Use Square Loyalty to reward repeat customers and motivate them to come back. You can offer loyalty stars per visit or amount spent and customize the type of reward you offer. There’s a 30-day free trial for Loyalty too, so you can see if it’s a good fit!
• Thank your employees for their hard work, especially during the long days of the busy season. Make sure you’re listening to them and helping create a great working environment. Happy employees = happy customers! 😊

Hear from other sellers

See how other businesses handle Black Friday — you may find something that will help you with your business when the big day arrives. 

What else do you do to prepare for Black Friday? Reply to this post and share your tips & ideas with us!

[shopfybr]

Yep, these are all great tips! Also planning ahead to run promos such as gift with purchase, gift card, or discounts is a good way to get customers excited. 

[TCSlaguna]

This is our first year using Square Loyalty. We are excited to see the results. I am optimistic it will encourage customers to keep coming back to us for their holiday shopping. 

I really like the ability with Square for Retail to have multiple registers and phones. The ability to scale up when needed is fantastic, and we use it quite often during events when the store is super busy. 

We need to try out Instagram Shopping to highlight our products. We use social media to mention events and products, but we really need to play around more with the integrations. I know the easier you make it for customers to shop, the more likely they are to purchase the product. 

Thanks for the tips @tranguyen!

[JUYBoutique20]

These are all great tips.  I also try to have some festive snacks and water available for my shoppers.  They love it...

[DinaLRosenberg]

Great Article.

We hold an employee appreciation dinner at the beginning of the season and give our staff gifts. We do these team building parties we do a few times a year to show our appreciation not just during the holiday season.

[Bronze_Palms]

Love these ideas! Can points earned through Square Loyalty count for double on specific days?

[Abigails_stl]

Yes! Under your loyalty dashboard you can click on "loyalty promotions" and set up a promotion for a day or a week or any timeline you like. 

[Bronze_Palms]

Love these ideas. Thanks for sharing! Definitely want to tap into online shopping this year!

[Abigails_stl]

Some great ideas! We started getting overwhelmed a few years ago on Small Business Saturday (which is our Black Friday) so we spread our discounts and giveaways out over the whole weekend (Friday-Monday) and this helped spread out the crowd too. Much more manageable on Saturday but still good traffic on the other days. We also love square loyalty because we get a lot of new shoppers on small business weekend that only shop for holidays and it helps to capture their info to lure them back in throughout the holiday seasons and big holidays for the rest of the year.

[Helen]

Such a great tip to spread your special offers over several days! 

[Stacelyn24]

Great tips and we'll definitely be implementing a few of these.  We're working on creating our holiday shopping omni channel right at the moment so thank you for these ideas 🙂

[HC_Charlie]

I just started to think about Holiday specials...I know, kinda late right 😉 (But I figured, as long as the shoppers haven't started yet, I still have time!) One idea i JUST had is to offer shoppers a "return" certificate. This would work by whatever amount a customer spends on Black Friday or Small Biz Saturday, they'll get a gift certificate for 50% of that amount to use if they return in January 2023. Has anyone tried this type of promotion? To make it more engaging, maybe I could also do a raffle for all of the certificates given out, and that one random person would receive 100% back through a return certificate.

I was going to offer specific items on sale, but hate the idea of spending time to enter into my POS system, or even make up signs or flyers, or doing social media posts. Am I tired, lazy, or just already over the Holidays 😜 ???