NEXTCOMMERCE is Black Friday ready

Black Friday is the night an e-shop is most likely to break, and it rarely breaks for technical reasons. Prices are changed by hand at midnight from a spreadsheet of discounted products. A landing page is built at the last minute by someone else. The campaign ends and half the prices stay reduced for another two days. With NEXTCOMMERCE none of that is manual: everything is set in advance inside the dashboard, and the platform does the switching on its own.

Everything lives on one screen, Black Friday. At the top is the campaign itself: a switch, a title and a subtitle for the page, and two fields, From and To, each a date and a time. Below it you choose what is discounted. Pick categories or products — one, or many at once, or everything a search returns — type a percentage and apply it. Give a different percentage to another group, and every line can still be changed on its own afterwards.

A category's discount reaches all of its subcategories, unless a subcategory has one of its own: supplements at -20% and vitamin C at -30% means vitamin C products are 30% off and every other supplement 20%. A product with its own discount keeps it, whatever its category says. Wholesale partners get the better of their own discount and the Black Friday one, never both added together.

Then nothing else needs doing. At the start time the reduced prices appear everywhere at once — in category listings, on product pages, in the cart and at checkout — with the normal price struck through and a small Black Friday mark beside it. At the end time every price returns to normal by itself, within about a minute. Orders placed during the campaign keep the price the customer paid.

Every store also gets its own Black Friday page, in the same Halloween look as the banner above, built automatically from the campaign: the headline reads the discount (or «up to» the highest one, when they differ), and every discounted product is shown with its own percentage and a link to its page. Only on that page the store's header and footer turn dark, and Halloween decorations — cobwebs, spiders, bats, pumpkins — move around the products without ever getting in the way of a click, and stay still for visitors who ask their device for less motion. Before the start it says when the offer begins; after the end, that it is over.

Setting it up takes a few minutes. First, in the dashboard open Black Friday, write the title and subtitle, and set From and To. Second, on the Categories or Products tab, tick what goes on offer, type the percentage and press Apply to selected; repeat for anything that needs a different percentage. Third, turn the switch on and press Save — the status line confirms when the campaign starts, or that it is running. Fourth, press View page to see it as a customer will, and point to it from your menu or the announcement bar. The full walkthrough is in the user guide inside the dashboard.

It works the same way for every store on NEXTCOMMERCE: one design, the store's own products, prices and dates. The campaign can be prepared weeks ahead and left alone, which is the whole point — on the night itself, the only thing left to watch is the orders.