Black Friday has a way of turning a simple promotion into a very long to-do list. You’ve got emails to send, ads to launch, orders to pack, and customers asking whether their stuff will arrive before Christmas. Somewhere in there, you also need to change prices on hundreds of products and make sure your inventory numbers reflect what you actually have in stock.
That’s where Your Store Tools can earn its title as your holiday MVP. Its Price Updater and Inventory Updater tools for BigCommerce and Shopify let you make bulk changes from a spreadsheet instead of working through products one at a time. With a Premium subscription, you can also schedule those updates in advance.
Get Your Sale Prices Ready Before the Rush
If your holiday promotion includes dozens or hundreds of items, changing each price individually gets old really, really fast. It also makes it easier to miss a product or enter the wrong amount when you’re rushing.
The BigCommerce Price Updater supports regular, sale, retail, and cost prices for existing products and variants. Upload a CSV or Excel spreadsheet, match items by SKU, and map the fields you want to change.
The Shopify Price Updater updates selling prices and Compare At Prices on existing variants. You can prepare both the sale price and the comparison price used to show the savings, then let the update run in the background.
For example, you could build a spreadsheet for your holiday gift guide with selected products reduced from $49.99 to $39.99. Review the entire promotion in one place before uploading it, rather than bouncing between product screens.
Schedule Black Friday While You’re Still Awake
With a Your Store Tools Premium plan, you can schedule price and inventory updates ahead of time on either platform.
Prepare your Black Friday pricing file, schedule the update to start at midnight, and get on with your evening. There’s no need to stay up just to click the button that starts the price changes. (Side note, because updates process as background jobs, think of midnight as the scheduled start of the update.)
Then plan the other half of the sale: ending it. Save your original pricing and prepare a separate update to restore it when the promotion finishes. Scheduling both jobs helps keep a weekend discount from becoming an accidental December-long discount.
Give Cyber Monday Its Own Promotion
Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers don’t have to be identical. You might discount bestsellers on Friday, feature accessories over the weekend, and offer a different selection on Monday.
Prepare separate pricing files for each stage and schedule the changes with Premium.
The same approach works for a “12 Days of Deals” campaign in December. Build each day’s pricing in advance, include the changes needed to end the previous offer, and spend less time managing prices once the campaign is underway.
Make Sure Your Inventory Can Keep Up
A great sale loses some of its appeal when you have to tell customers their purchases aren’t available.
The BigCommerce Inventory Updater lets you update stock quantities in bulk, along with settings such as low-stock thresholds, product visibility, availability, and order quantity limits. Some settings apply at the product level rather than to individual variants.
That opens up holiday uses beyond a stock count. Raise low-stock warning thresholds on fast sellers, set maximum order quantities on limited promotional items, or update availability across a group of seasonal products.
The Shopify Inventory Updater updates available quantities at the Shopify fulfillment location you select and can change inventory-tracking settings for matching variants. If you fulfill from multiple locations, prepare each update for the location that actually holds that stock.
After a warehouse count or the arrival of a shipment, these tools let you apply verified quantities across many SKUs without editing each item manually.
Keep Using Them After Cyber Monday
There’s plenty of holiday selling left after the big weekend. Use bulk pricing updates for last-minute gift promotions, discounts on seasonal merchandise, and post-Christmas clearance.
You can also adjust selected variants instead of discounting an entire product range. If particular sizes or colors need help moving, build your pricing file around those SKUs.
Before your first campaign, save your current prices, check SKU matches, confirm the scheduler’s time zone, and run a small test. Review completion notices and any reported errors, then spot-check the storefront.
The holidays will give you enough reasons to work late. Updating a spreadsheet’s worth of prices one product at a time doesn’t need to be one of them.
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.