Take Control of Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales with Launchpad by Shopify Plus

November 6, 2019
Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales with Launchpad by ShopifyPlus blog image

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are approaching fast, and for many merchants, the success of these sales can make or break the year.

Gone are the days when you could prepare for just one day of sales — no, no my friend — Black Friday has become a commerce juggernaut with presales starting weeks or months in advance. It takes a tonne of effort, time, and coordination to craft a single seamless sale experience for customers, let alone multiple in the same week!

What if you could take some of the heat off by managing your pre-sale activities in advance?

Launchpad by Shopify Plus does just that — and more — all while ensuring that the big day goes off without a hitch!

Where Does Launchpad Shine?

  • Theme switching
  • Product launches
  • Sale management

Releasing a new product? Prepping for a flash sale? Launchpad is your best friend — before, during, and after the launch of your event. Best of all? It’s free for Shopify Plus merchants!

Anatomy of an Event

In order to get a better understanding of how Launchpad works and what it does, let’s see it in action.

In this example, we’ll create a new event, launch and update the stock of a new product, apply a site-wide discount, change our active theme and apply custom BOGO and shipping scripts. Launchpad can do even more, but we’ll limit this tutorial to the main functionality. Let’s go! 

Start Date

Start by giving your Launchpad Event a title (note: only you will see the title) and start date. If you do not set a start date you will have the option to save your event as a draft. An important item to note here is that you currently cannot schedule overlapping events. 

start date module in launchpad

Product Release

Next, we’ll publish and increase the stock of this “Hot New Product” from 0 to 200 units. Stock increases remain even after the event is complete and newly published products will stay published. They will not revert to unpublished automatically at the end of the event.

product release in Launchpad

Discounts

What good is a sale without a discount? Let’s take 25 percent off everything in our “Tools” collection. Pricing changes are only in effect for the duration of the event — but remember — discount codes will still apply! Manually disable your codes, use a script, or hide the discount box if you don’t want customers stacking discounts.

Applying discounts in Launchpad

Themes

Ahead of time, create an event-specific theme that contains all copy, call-to-action, and creative changes you’d like to display during your event. You can duplicate your current theme and use it as the basis for the event theme. Here, you can see we’re enabling our event-specific “Black Friday Sale 2019” theme, during the event, and reverting back to our “Bounteous Production” theme upon event completion.

choosing a theme in Launchpad

Scripts

Let’s enable our custom “BOGO 50% OFF” Shopify Script during the event and unpublish all line item scripts after the event. Further, let’s also enable our “Free Shipping” script during the event as well. Remember to update any variables within your scripts, if necessary, ahead of time.

selecting a script in Launchpad

End Date

Finally, set your event end date and save! If you don’t specify an end date, the event will continue until you manually end it in the event dashboard. Note that while an event can go on indefinitely, the dashboard will stop reporting data after four weeks.

setting your end date in launchpad

Monitor your Event

You’re done! But, Launchpad doesn’t stop there. You can also keep an eye on the event’s performance in real-time

monitor your event in launchpad

You’ll be able to see: total sales, orders placed, and average order values. Additionally, you can get more in-depth data about the products sold, such as the best selling products and their inventory levels, as well as customer conversion data. These valuable insights are all served to you on a handy dashboard and are available after the event is finished.

Wrap-up

All in all, Launchpad is an incredibly powerful tool that can help take the stress out of launching a successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale, leaving you to focus on what you do best: growing your business!