We are approaching the end-of-year holiday season and you can smell already smell the frenzy shopping which will make or break your sales objectives in a few weeks. If your company isn't into BlackFriday/CyberMonday/Single's Day/Boxing Day, I'm sure you still have similar events at another point of the year, and being ready for it is crucial. Here a few tips on how to prepare:
That's my list after "suffering" many BlackFridays! Any other idea or best practice?
Pretty much a good and complete list.
One "failover" you could implement, to reduce customer discontent, is a static page in S3 with a generic discount code for later usage. If nothing else will work you can activate these page and at least keep some of the customers, that were otherwise unable to order anything at all, to order at a later point.
That's how we survived "Höhle der Löwen" (german tv show, similar to shark tanks).
From business perspective, comming from a company that centered there whole ecommerce strategy around flash sales, plan some extra contingents of high demand products (~5%) and keep them in a separate inventory.
This will allow to reduce dissatisfaction and handle overselling to a certain degree.
Also in a multi-warehouse situation, for example do to multi-country setup with own warehouses, you might be able to handle higher demands in a certain country with this separate contingent.
Downside, if not needed you might have some extra products in your warehourse, that you wanted to clear. So it's pretty much a product by product decision, which depends on the question, will I sell this product outside of the "sales event"?
Another trick, I've learned, once a product is sold out, show a "sorry" message with either alternative products or a small discount code, to at least get something out of the traffic, especially if it is paid traffic like google ads, and reduce customer dissatisfaction.
Great tips!