Black Friday Tips: For God's sake don't forget last year!

Don't repeat the same mistakes.

Martin Granberg is an expert on sourcing and pricing in e-commerce and is now doing a deep dive into the mistakes that e-tailers should avoid before and during Black Week.

How did last year actually go? Volume probably went up, but did you make the money you could have made? What should you do differently this year, or are you just going in the old, tried-and-true ruts? Learning from one's mistakes is fundamental in all learning, even within different organizations. But a surprising number of companies unfortunately fail to do so.

It is no news that where you have access to a lot of data, an iterative process is important. Where you analyze, adjust, and then follow up with an analysis to see what the adjustment led to. This is of course also true for price optimization.

To know if things are going "well", you also have to know both where you are coming from and where you are going. It is therefore important to set goals before this year's Black Week, for example set both against last year's Black Week, but also more profitability-based goals that you can then build your actions towards.

When you measure and analyze, it is important that you measure in the right way. There are many different ways of measuring, and different people think different measurements are more or less important.

I believe in measuring marginal kroner and what you actually earn. It is easy to maintain a high percentage margin on a small turnover.

Regardless of how you measure, it is important that it is actually done and followed up.

My tips:

• Make sure you get the historical data on the KPI you want to measure, or add for this year. Then you have a baseline to start from, then you know where you "are".
• What did you do last year that you can improve this year, or what direct mistakes did you make that should be avoided this year. Dare to talk about errors, or sub-optimized functions that can be improved.
• Based on where you are and where you want to go, along with lessons learned from last year, set concrete goals for this year's Black Week with steps to work towards.