UK SMEs are underprepared for Black Friday, says Royal Mail

Royal Mail has claimed that the United Kingdom’s 4.9m SMEs are “underprepared” for Black Friday. In 2014 consumers spent £810million online on Black Friday and Royal Mail research, conducted in August, has found that 60% of consumers are already preparing to shop online for this year’s event, which will take place on 27 November.

In a statement issued today (3 September), Royal Mail said that it had surveyed 250 small business owners and found that “while 95% are making preparations of some form, SMEs are not applying all the lessons learnt from last year’s event”.

What were those lessons? According to Royal Mail, the biggest challenges faced by SMEs on Black Friday last year were: coping with increased website traffic (48%); managing stock (44%); delivering their orders on time or quickly enough (33%) and distributing orders from their warehouse (31%).

Royal Mail claimed that its research has highlighted some important gaps in planning: “While small business owners are preparing for influx of web visitors (39% are arranging extra IT capacity), bringing in more staff to prepare orders (40% are employing additional staff) and improving the availability of products (with 55% ordering more stock), nearly two thirds are not preparing for the delivery of customer orders.”

The postal operator continued: “Only 38% of SMEs have extended their ‘delivery window’ to allow more time to get deliveries to consumers and just 36% are working with their delivery provider to forecast volumes. This means that up to 3.1m UK SMEs run the risk of not being able to meet their delivery promises and may undermine customer satisfaction on Black Friday.”

Royal Mail is therefore advising that SMEs should “work with their delivery provider to forecast volumes for Black Friday and the Christmas shopping period”.