Flash sales, what are they good for? Absolutely everything!

But... they can be extremely taxing on businesses and usually require a lot of manual merchandising.

They’re a mandatory part of the business and yet, planning and executing these events involves time. It also usually follows with a lot of disjointed tasks, as well as a lack of confidence in how the sale will actually perform.

Thankfully, that no longer needs to be the case. Why? Because the experts at Shopify Plus have recently introduced Shopify Plus Launchpad into the market and it’s making bigger leaps than Neil Armstrong.

What does it do?

Shopify Plus Launchpad provides enterprise merchants with a robust solution for managing site traffic, stock and sales volume. The Plus native software now enables merchants to build and launch events such as sales campaigns, product releases, and content changes with ease.

Effectively, it reduces manual and recurring tasks, allowing your time to be utilised effectively and efficiently.

How Does Shopify Plus Launchpad Simplify Events?

Through scheduling and automation, Launchpad can simplify the execution phase by automating your business’ event checklist. Not only does this reduce labour time and costs, It also minimises any risk of error.

“The Launchpad app gives our merchants the ability to put a sale event on ‘autopilot,’ allowing for the pre-planning and automated execution of a sales event.” - Shopify

All the seller has to do is select the specific products for the flash sale or inventory launch.

Even better? Absolutely no coding is required. By utilising Shopify Plus Launchpad, users can simply select a discount of choice, save it and then the rest is history. Shopify Launchpad will automatically launch the discount when the sale date/time comes around.

Shopify Plus’s Launchpad provides:

Exclusivity

Initiate invite-only and limited release product collections

Demand

Automate selection of products launched for sales

Scarcity

Lock your site before the launch of your event & schedule for custom changes to take effect

Integrate Campaign-Specific Themes

With Shopify Plus Launchpad, you can build and adjust campaign-specific themes to highlight sale and/or priority products. Merchants can also optimise these themes in advance to ensure you’re not hit with any unforeseen surprises come launch day.

This is a great way to enhance the customer experience. And, according to a study conducted by Walker, by the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the number one key brand differentiator. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

In short, Shopify Launchpad could help to boost your conversions/sales.

Automatically Publish Shopify Scripts

Shopify Plus Launchpad also features an automatic line item script that has the ability to offer exclusive promotions to certain customers on the checkout page e.g. offer a gift upon purchase or offer free shipping on orders over $100.

It also automatically enables a checkout CAPTCHA so you can sleep peacefully knowing your sales are devoid of any bots.

Real-time Tracking Capabilities

Monitoring sales in real-time can be challenging for businesses, particularly for those larger-scale sales and releases.

Luckily, Shopify Plus Launchpad allows businesses to monitor events performance in real-time i.e. allow for the tracking of total sales and placed orders, inventory levels and time-based average order values.

This is all available via Launchpad’s real-time analytics dashboard.

The dashboard gives merchants the ability to optimise the customer experience based on your audience's specific consumer behaviour on-the-go. You can track report data at the beginning of the sale, right through to the end (note: the dashboard feature is only active for the first four weeks of your event). The Shopify Plus Launchpad dashboard shows merchants:

• Total sales, orders placed & average order values

• Data about products sold

• Customer conversion data

Why Use Shopify Plus Launchpad?

Why use anything that will help improve labour time, business efficiency, data reporting as well as help to increase sales?

By enabling Shopify Plus Launchpad, merchants are able to get the most out of their events.

They have the ability to:

• Automatically schedule product price changes

• Schedule a time/date of release

• Rollout entire theme changes

• Publish specific products to your sales channels

• Increase inventory levels at the beginning of an event

• Schedule creative and theme customisations

• Integrate scheduled line item and shipping scripts for price changes at the checkout

• Temporarily lock the site before sales or inventory launch

• Utilise a CAPTCHA system to avoid bots

• Track event performance via the Launchpad dashboard

With the increasing importance placed on flash sales, it is imperative that they’re executed seamlessly. They’re designed to generate traffic, move inventory and expand the business. However, without utilising systems such as Launchpad, they can cost more energy, money and downtime than they’re worth. The more time you invest in setting up a flash sale, the less valuable the profit from the sale seems.

“Knowing that sale events like a flash sale are an important part of today’s retail landscape, we wanted to provide our merchants with an integrated solution that made the process easy and efficient.” - Shopify Plus’ Director of Product, David Moellenkamp

Shopify Plus Launchpad means merchants can create innovative campaigns with peace of mind. It is your command centre for major digital commerce events; customer-facing automation and real-time dashboarding. For more information, watch the full demo here.

For ultimate automation, It also works great with Shopify Plus’ ecommerce automation tool, Shopify Flow that efficiently automates common, everyday tasks. To find out more, contact acidgreen today. We’re your certified Shopify Plus Partners, and we’ll help you choose the path that’s most suitable for your business.

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acidgreen is an award winning e-commerce agency  specialising in Magento, Shopify Plus and digital marketing with over 15 years of  industry experience. Our certified developers and digital marketers are highly qualified to create aesthetically pleasing Magento and Shopify Plus websites that generate the highest amount of conversions and provide the best ROI. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, or give us a call to learn more about our services.