Black Friday is only a month away. So let’s talk about how I’m prepping this month. I’m focusing on 4 main things.
The first is supplies. The supply chain is not good for a lot of us right now. I’m sure most of you know this and are frustrated too.
But there are a few things that you can do to help make your life as easy as possible when it comes to ordering your supplies and raw goods.
First, you want to order as far in advance as possible. if you know that you’re going to go through a certain amount of supplies in November and December you want to have them on hand now. The next best thing you can do is have multiple backups for all of your current suppliers. So if one of your suppliers is out of stock or on backorder you know that there’s somebody else that you can turn to that will be in stock and at the price that you mean you’re supposed to be at. Then you won’t be wasting hours and hours of time during the months of November and December when you’re really busy searching for new suppliers that are hopefully in stock.
And the same is true for your shipping supplies, which is the second thing I’m focusing on this month. This is something that a lot of sellers will forget about. If you need boxes of a certain size and you know you’ll go through a certain amount in the next few months, order them in advance. I know it’s difficult sometimes to find a place to store these but it’s better than running out of stock. Especially if you order some supplies from USPS, like priority boxes, those always take a really long time to get to you in the month of November and December when shipping is really backed up and busy so order those in advance. I know that I have spent a lot of time during those months going to different USPS locations to try to get the size of box that I need, and this is such a huge waste of time when you’re trying to get orders out the door.
The third thing I want you to think about is pre-making inventory. Pre making inventory is a huge time-saver during your busiest months. and you can do this even if you have personalized items. think about what you can pre make to even just send you a save you a few minutes worth of time and then you can finish those personalized items when you actually get order. This is especially important for your best sellers that you know will sell in the next few months
The last really important thing I’m focusing on right now to prep for Black Friday is my marketing. You can schedule social media posts and emails to your email list ahead of time so when you get busy you don’t end up ghosting your audience.
So go through and create some graphics or spend an afternoon taking holiday-themed photos and then get things pre-scheduled throughout the end of the year.
You want to make sure that you go back through every week and make sure that your scheduled posts are relevant and that the captions are all accurate but if you get everything scheduled now the amount of time that you have to put into just checking things during the peak shopping weeks will be really low and you know that you’ll be consistent in posting no matter how busy you get.
This week I want you to do an Instagram story and share how you’re prepping for Black Friday. It will start getting your audience excited about shopping with you next month. Don’t forget to tag me in the stories so I can see how you’re prepping.
See you on Instagram!
-Sarah
