How to manage your inventory for Black Friday

Whether you run a brick-and-mortar retail store, an e-commerce site, or both, you probably already have a good idea of how Black Friday and Cyber Monday (or BFCM) can impact your company’s financial health. According to the National Retail Federation, in 2023 Black Friday sales attracted over 90 million online shoppers and over 76 million in-person shoppers.

The sudden influx of holiday shoppers can make or break a brand in a very short amount of time, and a significant risk factor for retailers in that equation is inventory management.

Inventory management — the key to e-commerce success

Managing inventory is crucial for a successful Black Friday campaign, but it can be tricky to get it just right.

Selling out of a popular item can wreak havoc on your sales and revenue during heavy shopping times since you’ll be missing out on potentially significant sales from unmet consumer demand. You want enough product to last throughout the sale.

However, you also want to make sure you don’t overstock, since that can have an unfortunate impact on your bottom line, as well.

Inventory management and planning can help you avoid these extremes and ensure you have enough of your products on hand to satisfy eager shoppers, but not so much that you’ll be dealing with overstocking costs.

Inventory management is also about choosing the right products for your BFCM sale. Your most popular item throughout the rest of the year might not align with your shoppers’ gift-giving plans for the holidays. Hot gifts and top-selling items in just about every department change and evolve over time, particularly during the holidays.

Yet longer-term trends can reveal what customers are still on the hunt for, no matter the time of year. While new products often land with a splash around the holidays, you can learn a lot by looking at past data.

Lastly, good inventory management for holiday sales is a detailed, complex process that involves several different aspects of your company’s operations. Managing them all takes effort, attention, and time. That’s why it’s important to make inventory management your priority well before the shopping frenzy of Black Friday hits your store.

Key steps to successful inventory management

Inventory management involves a number of moving parts. You want to craft as accurate a snapshot of your seasonal holiday inventory needs as possible, with enough advance notice so you can order those products in the right numbers and reorder them at the right time.

Inventory management includes past data review and analysis, demand forecasting, and good communication with vendors and employees. You’ll also need to ensure you have the right technology to keep your system running smoothly.

Past data review and analysis

Analyzing past campaigns helps you set clear inventory goals for your business that are based on actual data and trends over time.

It’s crucial to carefully examine your past inventory and sales report data for prior Black Friday sales. This helps you identify any blind spots you might have, especially if your inventory has the same struggles every year.

You’ll also be able to spot recurring trends and needs, helping you avoid spending on inventory that never performs well. This helps you accurately estimate your needs for any particular period of time, but it’s especially helpful for BFCM sales.

When you begin your data review, keep an eye out specifically for

• Inventory that didn’t move as expected
• Inventory that sold out in a few hours
• The goals you hit and those you missed

Looking out for these factors can help you identify what’s working and make necessary changes. For example, you can focus on products that consistently performed well in past sales and examine the levels at which they sold when you’re determining quantities to have on hand for Black Friday. Or, if you see that you met a sales goal but missed a profit goal, you might need to adjust prices.

You can also categorize and classify your inventory to help you spot macro trends, both now and in the future. Categorizing your products helps you create more effective marketing and advertising campaigns and optimize your e-commerce site for holiday shopping.

Keep in mind that shopping trends evolve from year to year, but starting with the most recent strong sellers will give you the best shot at success this year.

Demand forecasting

Demand forecasting is the process of predicting the quantity of goods or services that your shoppers will demand at some future point in time. It involves using predictive analytics to make educated guesses about what shoppers are likely to do.

Demand forecasting involves projecting future market demand for specific products or product types. It’s based on a solid understanding of prior years’ sales and inventory data. You should also include the following in your analysis:

• Seasonal demands
• Recent trends
• Marketing initiatives
• Changes in your geographical area or the world that impact shopping behavior
• Current industry conditions

Working with suppliers and vendors

It’s essential to communicate openly and often with your suppliers to make sure they have enough advance notice, production and shipping time, and capacity to meet your inventory needs. Start with a projected sales report based on the past Black Friday data you reviewed.

Then, working from the projections you crafted from your data analysis, work with your suppliers to get quotes and time estimates. Ask for production timelines and deadlines to avoid getting caught by surprise when it’s too late to do anything to solve the crunch.

It’s always smart to identify alternative products and vendors just in case high demand wipes you out or your supplier is at capacity.

Employee participation

It’s important to keep your store well staffed ahead of Black Friday and to communicate clearly with your employees so they’re prepared for the rush. Black Friday can be a stressful time for in-store employees, so check in with them and make sure they have the support they need and feel like there’s enough help on hand to manage the rush.

Your employees are essential for preparing for Black Friday as well. You can have them run an inventory count so you can find out exactly what products and how many units of each you have on hand, whether in a store or a warehouse.

Do this for your most popular products well before Black Friday rolls around to help ensure your inventory records and your physical counts match up. Identify any excess inventory that you can mark for deeper discounts.

Effective use of technology

Black Friday inventory trackers are powerful tools to include in your inventory management system, which can help you stay ahead of shifting trends and demands all year long if your business implements them correctly and uses them consistently.

Using effective inventory management automation tools can help you maintain the right mix and level of products for your store throughout the year, reduce inventory costs, and streamline your tracking systems. To that end, explore tools that have mobile inventory management capabilities to reduce costs and improve employee use.

Another aspect of your store’s technological system to review and shore up, when needed, is your website. You’ll want to ensure your website — and all of its product pages in particular — are optimized to bring more online searchers and motivated shoppers to your store, and that it’s optimized for mobile. Even before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’ll see an uptick in traffic from mobile users, so it’s important that your site is responsive on smaller screens.

Strong marketing plan

Create interest in your store’s sales offerings — as well as in shopping at your store or site in general — with a strong marketing plan. Once you’ve established your product list and optimized your inventory orders for those products, you should begin deciding how to highlight the products you believe your potential shoppers will want most.

One tactic to consider, for both brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce sites, is making a gift guide. Curate a selection of your products, focusing on those items you believe will sell especially well. Integrate social media marketing and email marketing to build excitement and demand for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

Black Friday inventory checkers — a powerful way to manage your goods

Jotform is a powerful form-building platform that you can use as an inventory checker to help manage your inventory more efficiently leading up to Black Friday.

You can use Jotform Apps — a no-code, drag-and-drop app builder — to create your own inventory app using one of our inventory app templates. You can use this app to host inventory tracking forms and tables in an easily accessible central location that can be viewed from any device.

You can also build online inventory management forms to track and analyze inventory. Add an inventory widget to your forms to help you create a customized inventory tracker.

You can build forms from scratch or customize one of our 10,000-plus form templates, including an assortment of inventory templates that can help you and your staff track your numbers accurately. Our inventory checklist template will help your team stay organized during counts.

Integrate your forms with over 240 powerful third-party tools, like Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and many more.

Manage your inventory in an automatically generated database with Jotform Tables, and take advantage of our budget sheet templates to help you forecast your cash flow and inventory ordering needs.

Analyze inventory trends with automated reports created from your inventory form submissions through Jotform Report Builder.

With the right technology and a healthy amount of lead time, you can ensure your inventory hits the Goldilocks sweet spot for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales — not too much, not too little, but just right.

Use Jotform’s suite of products to help you prepare for Black Friday — it’s free to try.

Photo by Kampus Production