Moeez: And we are back folks with day two of this year’s Prepathon. I’m so excited to get this day started because we have so much in store for you today. We will be starting off with a panel discussion on some Black Friday insights. We actually have a couple of sessions on Black Friday today. So, if you are a store owner who is preparing themselves and their stores for the busy holiday season ahead, make sure you stick around for these sessions because you will get a lot to learn and might be able to do some improvements, some optimizations for your online store for this busy holiday period.

So, joining me in this panel session today will be James Kemp, core product manager for WooCommerce. So, James, thank you so much for being here. It’s an absolute pleasure having you for this year’s Prepathon. How do you feel about this event and who else is joining you for this panel discussion?

James Kemp: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to it. I think it’s going to be more like a discussion than a talk as it were. And I will caveat the whole thing by saying that I’m losing my voice at the moment. So, I’m hoping that won’t become an issue. And also a slight correction that I’m the core product manager, not the head of product. But yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

I am going to be talking to both Chris Badgett who runs Lifter LMS and he runs it on WooCommerce, and Andrew Comb who runs a store called Compare the Bathroom, or he’s on the marketing team of Compare the Bathroom, which also uses WooCommerce. And I think there’s going to be tons of insights that we can gather and gain from both myself as someone who works building the actual platform and these two comparatively different types of WooCommerce stores. So yeah, I’d love for Andrew and Chris to introduce themselves if we could start with Andrew.

Andrew Comb: Oh, hi there. Right. I god, how do I begin? I joined Compare the Bathroom about eight years ago and we moved everything over to WooCommerce because the system that we had wasn’t very flexible, so stupidly I did that myself from pretty much nothing and it’s now quite a huge store. We also run another e-commerce store as well. So it’s quite a lot of work to manage and build it all, but it’s amazing how flexible it all is. You know, all the tools that are available to us and I’ve been learning a lot as I go on the fly. So yeah, that’s me.

Chris Badgett: I’m Chris Badgett and I’ve been selling software with WooCommerce for 11 years. Mostly I sell annual subscriptions, but also lifetime licenses and some other products. And I’m happy to share everything I’ve learned about preparing for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, leveraging WooCommerce in these times. So, thanks for having me.

James Kemp: Yeah, thanks for coming on. So, to set the scene, I know I have in the past also run a product shop, and we frequently had sales, but also Black Friday sales. And I know that our Black Friday sales were always like the most significant sale of the year. We always saw the most sales volume coming in during that time during that whole month compared to any other sales season. And I also know that it was a bit of a nightmare to actually prepare for that, not just at a technical level but also at a marketing level and optimizing the website in general to prepare for that, which was always a challenge.

So, I’m hoping that by having this conversation and getting the perspective of these different use cases of WooCommerce and different types of stores, that we can kind of gain some valuable insights for the people listening, to figure out ways for them to prepare their stores, or their customers’ stores depending on where they sit in that. So yeah, first of all, I think it’d be useful to talk about this preparation phase, and we’ll focus on Black Friday, but I think you can apply the same logic to any sales season. But like I say, Black Friday for me was always the biggest by like a substantial amount.

So yeah, I’d really like to talk about the preparation phase and when you actually start preparing, what that looks like, and also Chris, I know in particular you tend to start the Black Friday season a bit earlier than actual Black Friday. So I think it’d be interesting to hear a bit more about that.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. So I’ve been running Black Friday sales for over a decade and my biggest piece of advice is you can’t keep it all in your head. So use a tool like Trello or some kind of project management tool, particularly if you have a team that are doing different pieces of the Black Friday sale and all the technical needs for that. The good news is Black Friday comes around every year. So once you build a system, you can just kind of repeat it.

And the way I like to think about it is every year we try something new. You know, 80% of it works great, 20% doesn’t. So it’s just constantly getting better and better year after year. And an example of something I learned is that it’s very competitive during Black Friday and Cyber Monday or that long weekend. So what I decided to test one year was what if I start one week earlier before people have spent all their money, and then that worked really well. So I was like what if I start at the beginning of November? So for our business, we’ve transitioned to a concept called Black Friday all November. So that’s just an example of learning along the way. However, most of the sales do come in on the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, but we still get a lot in that buildup before people have spent all their money. So, that’s just a key idea there.

James Kemp: That’s interesting. I feel like a lot of stores have adapted to that as well. And you’re seeing stores start a week before. I know we always started a week before, started the actual sale a week before. And I think you do see that a lot now as well. So, I think moving to the month before is a nice concept. I wonder if we’ll just have like a permanent, you know, all year is Black Friday. Andrew, what’s your experience been like?

Andrew Comb: So ours is a little bit complicated. So we sync our store with eBay and another one called Mano Mano. And so that makes it extra complicated. So we have to mark down all of the products. They’ve all got different percentages off and then just spend absolutely free just doing CSV magic and manipulate all of the prices. That’s one of the biggest chores that we have.

Relatively speaking, changing the theme is also another big thing. You know, getting all the pages launched, the special page area, putting up any banners or designs or anything. Kind of the last few years, luckily, we sort of made, I think one of the very first themes we did specifically was for Black Friday. We launched it not long before and so we have a Black Friday design and so we have to switch everything over, change all the little color palettes, all the little widgets, get the banners on, get the pages on. It’s quite a lot of work and my mission has been to try and make this as simplified as possible of late, because it’s a huge amount of work.

But yes, I think we’ve only really started fully embracing it since we went to WooCommerce actually. So we’ve only been doing it a few years. eBay itself does its own sort of thing, but we tend to run in two week cycles for that reason. So we’ll usually start the week before the actual Friday event and go on until the week after. So it’s actually usually a two-week event for us, not necessarily just the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, because that’s what an awful lot of the stores seem to do as well.

James Kemp: So that’s fair. How far ahead of that period would you say you both start?

Andrew Comb: Quite quite a while. Luckily the theme part’s not too much of an onerous task anymore, but we’ve got to prepare lists of all of the items, get all the items marked down, and then it’s a huge task to get through all of those products and mark them down ready to go.

Chris Badgett: For me, if I was doing it the first time, I would start like 90 days early just to get ready if I was planning on doing a pretty big promotion with a lot of steps. But now it’s I need about a month head start and I’m good to go.

James Kemp: That makes sense. Andrew, you mentioned changing the theme as well. Do you change the whole theme or you just kind of brand elements?

Andrew Comb: Brand elements, add-on bits. We changed the front page design, added new banners, and then there’s a special area just dedicated for the Black Friday itself which just uses the same kind of theme element. We’re quite flexible. We’ve got the Cadence theme. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. And so you can do a huge amount in that theme. It’s fantastic. Just build everything in blocks and hook it onto pages. So you can adjust. Again, I keep pushing on that. There’s so many little things that you can do with it. Year on year, it’s getting bigger and bigger.

James Kemp: Yeah. So I had a plugin company before, where I worked, that WooCommerce acquired, which was acquired by Stellar who owns also Cadence. So yeah very familiar and we used to use Cadence as well. And something that we did was we prepared all of these theme elements ahead of time. And I think it was in Cadence or like some sort of extension that enabled the ability to show/hide blocks in the theme at a certain time. Whereas I know previous years I’ve had to sit there at midnight and wait to hit the go live button, which is yeah one of the biggest challenges I think, is actually preparing all of those elements.

And like you say, we also had a specific landing page. Our shop had 10 to 15 plugins that were in the sale, and when browsing the site it was kind of hard to envision what that discount looked like. So we had a landing page for that, which worked really well actually, and the checkout, you were able to check out on that page as well. So there’s definitely a lot of marketing prep work that needs to happen as well as preparing emails. You know, the email sequences that you need to put together can become either highly complex or as simple as you like.

We tried multiple approaches in terms of how many emails are sent, the different segments that they’re sent to. So you might want a different email depending on if the person’s renewing soon anyway, or if they were a previous customer, or if they’re just someone on your list that has never purchased. There’s tons of things to think about there with emails, but you could also just go as simple as send the same email to everyone. You know, we’ve got a Black Friday. Maybe you send that before the sale starts, when the sale starts, and when the sale’s going to end. So, you could go as simple as you like, and I’d probably recommend just going as simple as possible to start with because that can occupy a lot of time, especially if you’re a solo founder or don’t have a marketing team as it were.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’ll just add that there’s like four key pieces. So, I like to write the emails in advance in a Google document, and then I use a plugin made by the team at Paid Memberships Pro called Sitewide Sales which can pop a banner at a specific time and that sort of thing. And then either having a landing page or a news item blog post that kind of puts all the information in one place. And then the fourth thing is preparing in Canva or something like that your social media graphics that you’re going to be doing in advance. That’s most of the Black Friday sale, that whether you’re just starting out or you’re a seasoned pro, you got to have all those assets ready to go.

James Kemp: That’s true. Another thing I haven’t thought about until you said that was we used to do retargeting as well, mostly on Facebook. So, you’d have like Black Friday specific adverts there as well. So yeah, there’s tons of stuff specifically for Black Friday and I guess any sale that you could put together. But my advice would be to start with at least a landing page and some sequence of emails, even if it’s just three emails. And also a banner. I used to have a banner at the top of the site that was sitewide, just indicated that, yep, we’re having a sale, go and check it out. But yeah, just make some noise and don’t be afraid to make some noise that the sale is happening. It’s a very noisy season. You know, people are getting tons of emails. So it’s definitely worth trying to stand out. If people don’t want to hear, then they will unsubscribe.

That’s awesome. I saw a question come in from Curtis who said, “We’re very much focusing on like existing businesses.” Do either of you have any insights for startups or businesses that haven’t been online for too long? Maybe they’ve come online this year for the Black Friday season.

Chris Badgett: I would say to just keep it simple at the absolute minimum. Send an email and make a coupon code and just start small. You can get advanced as you go. The other advice I would have is to be more generous than you feel comfortable with in terms of the discount amount. Now it depends on your margins whether you’re doing physical products or digital products. But the whole point of Black Friday is a shopping spree because of these crazy discounts. So when you tap the river of demand and the buyer psychology that’s already there from in-person shopping malls, you want to replicate that experience with your WooCommerce store.

James Kemp: Agreed. And I think a lot of it also depends on who you can send this information to, right? Like you need to start thinking ahead of time how you can gather emails for people that might be interested, or have a space where you can share this discount. And I think that’s a massive thing, is knowing that you can send your discount to people that would be interested. It’s also a very hard thing to achieve. Have either of you kind of had a lead magnet as it were to try and get these emails in before you send out information about a sale?

Chris Badgett: I’ve done a popup before that said notify me about the Black Friday sale and run that like a month in advance. So then you get the people that are most interested. And the other tip I just want to put out there for people who are just starting out, there’s a lot of media sites or deal sites on the internet. So part of our Black Friday process is we have a list of about a hundred websites that publish Black Friday deals in our niche. So we let them know about our deal in advance. So you don’t have to be responsible for sending all the traffic to your site. And that doesn’t cost money like paid ads, which is also good to do. But especially if you have an affiliate program and share commissions, there’s a whole industry of people that want to promote deals in all kinds of niches, not just software.

James Kemp: Yeah, we also did experiment with tailored pop-ups specifically for Black Friday, you know, like sign up for our newsletter, we’ll send you coupons, things like that. I guess the other important thing is, I know it’s not necessarily being mentioned, but tightness of design. You know, make everything look coordinated, make it all look really sharp. I know people sort of look at designs almost like a second-class citizen, but you really need to make sure that everything just looks swish and works if they can’t open images, because I’m sure you’ve all had those emails where you open it up and it just looks terrible because you can’t read any of the text. So, just do a little bit of experimentation. What happens if the image loading fails, anything like that? It’s quite common on email systems.

Yeah, and take inspiration. I think there’s tons of sites out there that document other people’s Black Friday pages and also their emails. There was a site that used to document brand emails. I can’t remember what it was called. Maybe someone else knows. But that was very good. Like you could see every email they send and get tons of information from that about what works and what doesn’t. But yeah, definitely focus on that brand.

I think it’s important to also think about the technical abilities of where your site is hosted. A lot of times depending on the product offering that you have, as well as seeing an increase in revenue during the Black Friday season you will also see an increase in traffic. And depending on how your site is set up, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. So I don’t know about Andrew, your store, is there any precautions that you take specifically at that time of year or have taken just in general to make sure you’re covered?

Andrew Comb: That’s such a general thing. We haven’t yet had a flood unfortunately, a flood in the Black Friday. We run sales all throughout the year. The Black Friday still is an important sale for us, but it’s probably one of the bigger ones, but we do them all through the year. Just keep on managing, I’m constantly looking at the cPanel CPU usage to make sure we’re not being flooded. Monitoring the whole thing. So yeah, it can be quite good. Recently we moved everything across to Cloudflare which does help an awful lot. I’m still getting to grips with it all, but strong caching, you know, so that not all the resources are coming directly from your site helps an awful lot, and again I’m learning more about that as I go along myself.

But I absolutely recommend that people get themselves strong caching, which unfortunately is a counterpoint to what you were saying about having automated timings, that can really interfere with it, you know when you’ve got like a banner that pops up at midnight. Well, except your cache doesn’t mean that it doesn’t go. And of late I have had a lot of problems with cron jobs as well because they can go a bit awry occasionally. Don’t always trigger when you should have done. So yeah, can get quite technical.

James Kemp: Yeah. So I think a key point there is you could automate a lot of these things but make sure you keep an eye on it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I’m a fan of having really good hosting. So, I’ve never had to change my plan, but depending upon what host I was on, I would not be shy about increasing the resources for a month, and then I could always scale it back down. And for us, we get about triple the normal month’s revenue and triple the traffic. So, it is quite a bit of increase. And you definitely just don’t want to be caught. And if your hosting has, or there’s some service you can sign up for to let you know if the site’s having issues so that you can find out in real time and deal with it, I’d recommend doing that. But at a minimum, no harm in increasing your resources during that period.

James Kemp: That makes sense. There’s a service called Uptime. I think there’s also one called Robot Ninja or something like that. And some of these services as well can monitor not just whether your site is alive, but also whether the checkout process is working. Which is always useful to know. And that’s an important thing. If you change a bunch of stuff on your site for a sale, you should test it. Like don’t just turn it on and walk away. Test the checkout. Make sure the landing pages and the unique temporary flows you’ve set up are working as you would expect. As well as if you have special emails that go out when people buy during this period. Like for example, we give away, and this is a tip for beginners and established people, sometimes it’s not just about lowering your price but adding bonuses. So, it’s really important that after they purchase, the email that gives them access to all the bonuses goes through. So, you should test all these things.

Very true. Are there any changes in terms of your checkout itself? Do you make any changes there or you keep the same checkout that you typically have?

Andrew Comb: Yeah, you just keep the same one really. I’ve never really thought about that actually. We can, I guess, sometimes we have a little banner. We can, because again I can edit the checkout page and put a banner in, and so we’ll say oh by the way you know that these items are on sale. But we don’t specifically modify it per se.

Chris Badgett: We have to make a lot of changes because we don’t use, we use WooCommerce but we kind of have our own custom landing pages and pricing tables and things. So the buttons to add to cart are just URL, direct to checkout with coupon codes. So there’s a lot of changes of button links as well as strikethrough pricing that we do to show the discount. So there’s a lot of changes, and that’s in terms of just pricing and how much the discount is and making sure all those direct to checkout links, whether they’re from the website or from an email or a landing page, that all those are adjusted and good to go. And then I put a calendar event in my calendar after the sale period is over to revert back because you also have to undo everything you just did for the sale.

James Kemp: Yeah, that’s a good point. I like the direct to checkout approach. I think it kind of lands the person, like they’ve shown intent for whatever product they’ve clicked on and they land right where the action happens. I don’t know if you’ve seen, but recently we, being WooCommerce, released checkout links, where in the past you could only add one product to checkout via a direct link at a time, whereas now you can kind of compile a checkout including coupons and generate a link just for that. So I think that would be super useful for that kind of use case, like especially if you say if you buy all five of these products you get x% more discount. So I think that could be a very useful use case for checkout links.

So we’re kind of talking about how to set up and how to prepare for it. Have either of you ever experienced it going wrong? Like has there ever been a scenario where you’ve set it up but actually the day after you realize that it’s not working at all?

Andrew Comb: Yes. But I had to just do it manually. The cron job just failed. So we set it all to run. It didn’t.

James Kemp: What was the cron job meant to do?

Andrew Comb: No, no. It just, like, we had it set up so that it was going to, you know like you go into the product, you say from this date to this date, and it just didn’t happen and unsure why, and if I knew these things I’d probably get paid more. So then had to just go in and make sure that everything was running. Had to manually make sure everything. So we don’t rely on that anymore. We do it manually.

Chris Badgett: Just to make sure. For me it’s just like some detail I missed whether turning the sale on or turning it off, in terms of like oh maybe I did a math error in the strikethrough pricing, or people are buying and still getting the bonuses after the sale because I forgot to disable an automation in my CRM powered by WP Fusion. So there’s always little stuff like that, but we’ve never had a catastrophic failure.

James Kemp: Good. And typically that kind of stuff is a frustration, but you can solve it pretty quickly, right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I doubt anyone’s complained about it.

James Kemp: Cool. Yeah, I think it’d be interesting to talk about kind of the human side of this and psychologically what you found works best for Black Friday sales. I know there’s a lot of discussion around like what the best discount level is. Also like how to present that to your customers, how to avoid your customers getting annoyed that maybe they purchased two days before the sale started, and how you handle those situations. I’m interested to know about the discounting levels. Chris, I know you’ve done a lot of research into like the optimum discount point. Have you got any insights to share on that?

Chris Badgett: Well, it definitely depends on your profit margins, but with our digital software, we go big and the discount is only for the first year. So, we’d rather get more customers with a big discount like 50 or 60% off and then have a recurring customer that stays with us for the long haul. So in the digital high margin business, I do pretty big discounts. And one of the psychology, one of the main things that really motivates people is to get in early and get it while it’s on sale. And also it’s important to note that for existing customers who already know your brand and like what they’re doing, getting them to, I call it expansion revenue, get more stuff from you or upgrade to something bigger, it’s a great time of year to do that.

And on the human side, we do a lot of like high-touch human sales during this time of year. So for example, we’ll do things like make our phone number more prominent and the phone is ringing a lot more during this period. We’ll do live Zoom meetings and have like an event where we present on some cool stuff, talk about the sale, talk about the bonuses, answer questions, or in sales we would call it handling objections. But we get really out there and really accessible during this period. And people, psychology-wise, tend to either buy right at the beginning or right at the end, right before it goes off sale. And most of the action is right at the end. And that’s just human nature with loss aversion, if you will, that people want to get the deal while it’s available. So be ready for a lot of activity at the very end of the sale.

James Kemp: Yeah, I saw the exact same scenario where Black Friday itself was always quite high and then Cyber Monday was always 1.5 to two times more than Black Friday, which was always interesting. I think it does tie into this fear of missing out a little bit. So yeah, that’s definitely true. Do you experiment with different discount levels throughout the month that you do Black Friday, or is it just like Black Friday is this amount, there’s no early bird?

Chris Badgett: I’ve tried, that’s one of the experiments I’ve tried. So I tried once doing what’s known as an Irish auction where the earlier you buy, the cheaper it is. Or you could do it like if 50 people buy here, they get this price, but then the price slowly edges up still on sale. But I found that there’s a saying in sales psychology that the confused mind doesn’t buy. And I found that that was true. So now I just keep it simple. It’s a standard discount.

James Kemp: Yeah, that’s interesting.

Andrew Comb: We’re kind of at the different end because we have literally thousands of products on our site. It would take far too long to modify them. We’re also very tight on our margins. Obviously, we’ve got to try and get out there as low as possible. So, we can only offer so much money. Obviously, Black Friday, we do put a little bit more of a boat out just because it’s the big event, but it would be very onerous to constantly modify the prices during the event because of how big of a process it is. At least now we can kind of automate it. At first, we were doing it manually.

James Kemp: Which, with your discounts, Andrew, is it you’re not doing like a flat percentage, but every product?

Andrew Comb: No. No, we don’t. It would be wonderful if we could. No, we’ll have different lines. Different things have different margins, and some things are ongoing lines. Sometimes we’re running things down so they’ll offer bigger margins because we already have had the stock for a while and it’s not selling. It’s complicated. So we have a huge list of like what percentage we’ve got to take off on all these different lines, which often is complicated because then you also have variations as well. I don’t know how you guys have it. It can be very complicated. How do you take all of different discounts? Obviously, it’s not per variation, but you’ve got to adjust all of them on a variation. That takes quite a big process.

James Kemp: Yeah, I can imagine. And across different platforms as well, right?

Andrew Comb: Yeah, that’s a hefty task.

James Kemp: Yes. Someone’s asked in the chat, and I’m going to say Madan, hopefully I’ve said that right. What if you’re selling mainstream items, well-known products that everybody else sells and the margins are not high? How do you stand out? And I think that touches on Chris’s point earlier about just being really available and standing out through service and being the most approachable shop that is selling these items and also the most understanding. That was always one of my main things when I was running my plugin company, was to have the best service. Even though you’re not physically there with them, you’re just giving them support. You’re answering their questions with positivity. Even if the answer’s no, you answer in a positive way, direct them somewhere else where they could satisfy whatever their requirements are. And people remember that and I think that’s important.

Chris Badgett: I think also bonuses. There’s a big opportunity with that in terms of differentiation. Even just like a personalized 15-minute phone call, if it’s something expensive that could warrant that, or you could do like a group call with a lot of people. Even like a simple digital ebook or something that just adds bonuses to this mainstream offer can be quite powerful.

James Kemp: That makes sense. And I guess for something like Andrew’s bathroom store, and maybe this isn’t relevant, but you could have like a setup service that, typically if you buy this product, you have to pay extra for the setup, whereas if you buy in Black Friday, maybe you get the setup free or discounted.

Andrew Comb: No, but we do do bespoke stuff. It’s difficult actually. We try and be as keen as possible. Just constantly looking about, seeing what everybody else is doing it for. Trying to be as keen as possible. We do sell a lot of branded stuff. Get the brand out there, you know, because at the end of the day, sometimes it’s not even about how good your service is. It’s just like making sure that everybody knows that it is legitimate. You know, that it’s not just a knockoff or anything like that. We get a lot of questions, people going, “Is this legitimate?” Yes, it is, it’s an official one. It’s a very important thing to get across. And just making sure that you’ve got good customer service. It’s probably about the most important thing. Make sure that the questions get answered really fast. And that’s a challenge when you’ve got this influx of users.

James Kemp: Chris, go ahead. What were you going to say?

Chris Badgett: Oh, just one more creative idea is you can also look at it as a marketing opportunity. So, for example, if you were to include a hat or a t-shirt or some kind of swag item, you may be hurting your margins, but you’re also giving like a t-shirt to a customer who’s going to evangelize your product. So you can kind of look at it a little bit like an advertising expense. So in some ways, if I did that during Black Friday and didn’t make any money, but then got a bunch of people walking around with my brand on, I think that’s kind of cool.

James Kemp: Yeah, that’s an interesting approach. Have you tried that?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we do. We’ve done the t-shirts before for our most expensive item, which has a lot of margin in it, and people love it. I’ve seen it, like people take a picture with it, they’ll put it on social media. Some of these people I’ve interviewed on the podcast and they’ll show up wearing their branded merch. So yeah, good idea.

James Kemp: Any other points on the kind of psychology behind pricing, and maybe, I know there’s a lot of FOMO type tools available like countdowns and limited stock and that kind of thing. Stock-wise I guess Andrew that might be more relevant to your type of store.

Andrew Comb: Yeah, we do try and keep an active check on stock and it’s visible on our store so people can see how many are left. Keeping the stock correct across all the platforms is a bit of a nightmare where we’ll have people buying it because it’s cheap and then the buy across all three platforms, that’s happened once and then we’re like oh no, where are we going to get the extra stock from. But yes, making sure that the stock is, it is a big thing for FOMO if it’s the last few.

James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. I know it’s convinced me to buy a few times. Also there’s tools that kind of pop up in the corner that says someone just bought this, or, I don’t know if Amazon do it, but I’ve definitely seen it on some department stores where they say 10 other people are looking at this product or 15 people have this product in their cart. And things like that are good. I think they’re good when they’re true. I don’t like to see them faked. And you do see that a lot.

Andrew Comb: Yeah. It would say like you’ve got 10 minutes to check out and then you refresh the page and it resets back to 10 minutes.

James Kemp: Yeah, that goes against building that trust that we were talking about.

Chris Badgett: We also tap into a buyer psychology trigger known as identity or confirmation. So this is more subtle than scarcity and urgency, but reminding people about kind of the identity, and if they’re going to be around for a while, they could buy more quantity or upgrade in our case to a lifetime license. So the specific messaging we use in that case is, we sell learning management system software, we’ll say if your learning platform is here to stay, why not get this lifetime license at a big discount. And that “here to stay,” if somebody’s really a life user and really identifies with your product, it’s a perfect opportunity to sell bulk or more and just remind them that, hey, you’re in this club. We’re all on the same mission together. Why not just get more of this because you’re one of us, which is not trying to convince somebody. It’s just more reminding them like, hey, I know you’re going to be buying this product every month or every year, why not while it’s on sale?

James Kemp: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think particularly when they’re buying something like an LMS platform that essentially powers their business or their side project. You know, reducing costs there for them is an ideal thing to do.

I wanted to touch on Andrew’s point earlier about kind of building trust. And I think something that I always do is if I’m buying from a site that sells a product that other sites sell, what I will always do is check Trustpilot or whatever their review system is. For me, it’s always Trustpilot. I just Google the site’s name and then Trustpilot. But I know people use reviews, they use G2. So there’s platforms out there and I think something that you can do in terms of preparation is to make sure you’re getting reviews on these platforms. You know, having a presence that shows that yes, this is a real company, we’re trusted, our customers are happy. And I think that can be the tipping point for someone making a purchasing decision.

Andrew Comb: Yeah, we work very hard to try and keep our Trustpilot score as high as possible. We do send out little reminder emails, and carefully, because I like the way that Trustpilot handles it where it sends out the email but doesn’t show you the score that it’s already there. It’s a really good way in case you’re not doing so well. I mean we are actually doing quite well at the moment but it’s an ongoing one, but again we, it’s trying to coordinate between, because we also very carefully manage our eBay and our Mano as well, make sure that we keep high scores, good reviews. It’s a thing to sort of constantly be on, it’s one of many things isn’t it, so much things.

James Kemp: I think also something that I always found quite valuable is even if you get a negative review, if you reply to that in a friendly, positive way, people see that and they’ll understand your side of whatever that story might be. So even a negative review is an opportunity to show that you do have good service and you are a legit company. I think that’s a valuable thing to do.

I know we don’t have too long left but I thought I would jump into sort of a lightning round. And it may be that we just don’t have any experience with these different things. But one of the first questions or scenarios would be what’s your take on the biggest mistake that a first timer could make when coming into a Black Friday sale? Chris, I’ll go with you first.

Chris Badgett: I would say not doing as big of a discount as you could and then also not spending the time doing the project management to set up the whole thing for success because it’s just too many activities to just keep in your brain.

James Kemp: We’ve touched on doing big discounts. What do you class as a big discount?

Chris Badgett: It depends on the margin. I would just say do more than you’re comfortable with. It’s still profitable.

James Kemp: Yeah, that makes sense. Andrew, what do you think would be the biggest?

Andrew Comb: It’s a tricky one, and we’ve recently been doing a big project in the company just to try and actually find out how much margin we’re making because it’s really complicated. We sell a lot of really big items. So, you’ve got to go, well, how much did that actually cost, how much the delivery cost? Because sometimes you just approximate it and you can lose out if you’re not careful about all the margins. So, just constantly be very aware of your margins and your costs. And I don’t want to sound like I’m going against what Chris is saying, but the opposite is just to make sure that you’re not actually making negative money, you know, make sure that everything adds up and it all works.

James Kemp: Yeah. I think like Chris said, it depends on your margins, right? But the point is to discount as much as you can without it being a negative. And I think especially in Chris’s scenario where that customer is potentially going to fall in love with your product and renew next year at full price, you could afford to discount a bit more than you’re comfortable with in those scenarios. And even for a physical product business, I think, for something like bathrooms, someone might buy a part for their bathroom, or a bathtub and they might have a good experience and come back and buy more, hopefully. So, you’re winning customers that aren’t just a one-time thing, which I think is important.

Chris Badgett: That’s why it’s important if you can to figure out your LTV, your lifetime value, because if you know some of those metrics, then you can kind of make an investment early that you know is going to pay off in the long run.

James Kemp: For sure. I think this has been an awesome conversation. I appreciate you both coming on to talk about it. And also before we wrap up, I’d love to know, Andrew and Chris, and I’ll share myself, how we could reach out to you if we have any questions or follow-up.

Andrew Comb: Oh, I don’t know what my publicly available, I’ll have to get back to you on that. You can always send a form to Compare the Bathroom and there’s a customer services form, you can send me a message that way.

James Kemp: That’s a good thought. Perfect.

Chris Badgett: And Chris, I’m all over social media. I’m the most active on Twitter or X, which is Chrisbadgett. And if you want to check out what we do, just check out lifterlms.com.

James Kemp: And I am James Kemp on Twitter/X. And I’m open DMs, so feel free to reach out.

Moeez: Yeah, I think this was a very insightful session. I think a lot of people who are sort of in that stage, a lot of store owners, a lot of business owners who are at that stage where they are sort of preparing for the upcoming Black Friday season, upcoming busy holiday season, I think they got a lot out of this session. I want to thank James, Andrew and Chris for being here. It means a lot to us and to our audience as well that you take your time out and come here and educate us on this much important topic.

Before I let all you three go, I just want each one of you to share a quick word about what do you think about the Prepathon, this online event, and how has your experience been so far as a speaker. So, James, if you can start us off with that.

James Kemp: Sure. Yeah, I tuned in yesterday for a few of the sessions. I watched Katie’s session. We’re in a similar market, so that was very insightful. Yeah, I love an online event. You know, it’s a chance for anyone to attend and anyone to kind of get these insights no matter where they are. So, I think it’s very valuable. And yeah, I appreciate you inviting me to speak and I hope this kind of format has proven valuable, and I appreciate Andrew and Chris accepting the invitation to join.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I just want to say thank you for having me. And I like to say every company is an education company whether they realize it or not. So, it’s great to have this kind of popup learning opportunity to help educate folks that are doing e-commerce and sales and that sort of thing. So, good for you for creating this learning opportunity.

Andrew Comb: Yeah. It’s been a really lovely event so far. Everybody’s been super friendly and all very professional. I was quite surprised at how complicated it all is behind the scenes. So, it’s been really good. So thank you very much for inviting me on here and I’m having a great time so far.

Moeez: All right. Thank you so much, James, Chris and Andrew for being here today and sharing your knowledge and wisdom with our audience. As for our attendees, please don’t go away because next up we have an amazing session from Sonja. She’s going to be talking about storefront to strategy and what happens when AI shops for you. So don’t go away. We will be back in just a few minutes.