Preparing for holiday sales
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There are many common seasonal sale periods during the year, such as Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Merchants will want to begin planning their promotions and training their sales team to ensure everything is set up for success.
Use this guide to learn about Recharge tools and resources you can leverage during the sales period as well as Recharge Support help and troubleshooting coverage during the holidays.
Use Recharge sales tools
Recharge provides a rich array of tools for seasonal sales. Certain tools may require setup time, be part of our Early Adopters Program (EAP), or be exclusive to Plus or Custom pricing plans. Prepare appropriately to ensure eligibility and familiarize yourself with these tools before utilizing them in a crucial sales period:
- Automate: Use Automate to automate subscription management, providing customers a dynamic shopping experience with tailored flows.
- Bundles: Bundles allow you to group items together under one SKU to create a “build-a-box” experience.
- Cancellation prevention strategy: Create unique win back and churn mitigation strategies to prevent customer churn.
- Discount Codes: Recharge supports all discount code types offered by Shopify, allowing you to create fixed discounts, offer free shipping, and more. Discount codes will give an additional discount on top of subscribe & save discounts.
- Dynamic pricing: Offer customers a different product price at checkout than what they pay on their recurring orders.
- Enhanced Analytics: Evaluate the success of your holiday sales with our newly enhanced analytics suite. No implementation is required.
- Rewards: Offer credits, rewards, and subscription discounts.
- Quick Actions: Use Quick Actions in your Klaviyo notifications to cross-sell or upsell to new and existing subscribers.
Explore sales techniques to boost campaigns
Looking to run a specific campaign? Check out the following resources to implement different sales techniques:
- Create a discount code with a minimum purchase amount.
- Offer a discount code or set up a Workflow to offer free shipping.
- Use dynamic pricing to offer alternative product prices and display recurring prices at checkout.
- Create free trial offers, welcome offers, ongoing sequence flows, and more using Automate.
- Create an abandoned cart email using Klaviyo to send to customers after your sale period ends.
- Upsell one-time products to a subscription order while the customer is in the cart.
- Post-purchase cross-sell: Encourage customers to add an additional product to their order post-checkout, either as a one-time or on a recurring basis.
- Promote seasonal subscription offerings on your store’s homepage.
Custom use cases
- Offer a discounted price for new customers only by changing the subscribe and save price in Recharge or the product price on your e-commerce platform.
- Offer a discounted price on the first order by doing one of the following:
- Using a discount code for the first order.
- Updating the subscribe and save price, then bulk-updating customer subscription prices afterward.
- Create a Workflow to update the product price after checkout.
- Exclude subscription products from discounted prices by removing the subscribe & save discount or unpublishing the subscription widget during the promotional period.
Plan ahead
Recharge wants to ensure that your sales run smoothly during the holiday season. It is better to plan ahead now than to troubleshoot during busy sales times. We recommend following these tips to ensure the best possible performance during your sales:
Discounts
- Confirm if your discount codes are set to apply to the correct channels.
- If using the Shopify Checkout Integration, make sure you have created the discount code in Shopify with identical settings.
Checkout
- Test shipping prices at checkout and upcoming orders for accuracy.
- Test all workflows, discounts, and shipping flows you are using by running a test transaction.
- Automatic discounts do not apply to recurring orders. If you are using automatic discounts at checkout and want the discount to apply to recurring orders, it is recommended to use a discount code or change the product price instead.
Customer portal
- Check your customer portal settings and collections to ensure which products can be bought through the customer portal during the sales period.
Inventory
- Check your product inventory settings in Recharge and your ecommerce platform.
- Enable partial order fulfillment to improve out-of-stock inventory handling and reduce the number of orders that result in an inventory error state.
- Review how to handle out-of-stock item errors.
Other settings and tools
- Make any theme changes before the sales period, as changing your theme may require the widget to be reinstalled.
- Review upcoming subscriptions using your exports and make any bulk changes at least five days before the holiday sale. See the Bulk updates section for more information.
Support coverage and services
In-app support will be available 24/7 during the holiday season, providing all Recharge users with instant access to helpful resources, including FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and product information.
Live chat coverage
Note: Live chat coverage will be unavailable on Black Friday due to the Thanksgiving holiday. You can use our in-app support to get help from our virtual assistant or create a support ticket. Live chat coverage will be available on Cyber Monday.
When you require personalized assistance, our support agents can also assist you further through live interactions via our in-app support. You can reach out to a live agent for support from 6 AM to 6 PM PST, Monday to Friday, (except for observed US holidays) or create a support ticket at any time.
Priority levels
Recharge handles tickets based on priority and prioritizes business-critical issues during high-sales periods. For example, broken checkouts or app outages would take precedence over incorrectly set discount codes or workflows. Contact support by clicking Get help in the Information menu.
Priority Level |
Definition |
| Urgent | Store down: Recharge is entirely down, or system-critical functions are inaccessible to users. |
| High | Orders Affected: A major component of the store’s ability to operate is affected. Some aspects of the business can continue but it's a major problem. |
| Normal | Degraded Service: Where there is a moderate loss or degradation of services, but work can reasonably continue in an impaired manner. |
| Low | General Questions: Non-critical issues or general questions about the application. |
Bulk updates
Most bulk updates can be done easily by your team. Updates that require Recharge Support are indicated in the help document. Bulk updates are not performed on the weekends.
We recommend merchants review upcoming subscriptions at least a week before seasonal sales and submit eligible bulk update requests five business days before any upcoming holidays.
Managing post-holiday sales
Use our guide Managing post-holiday sales to ensure success for after the holiday sale period.
Other resources
- Four Black Friday/Cyber Monday pitfalls subscription brands can turn into growth
- Maximizing your BFCM sales: Subscription models that boost customer retention
- Turning holiday shoppers into lifelong subscribers: A DTC brand's 6-step plan for Black Friday/Cyber Monday success
- 5 ecommerce holiday planning tips to stay on the nice list this year
- How subscriptions eliminate the need for holiday order stress
