Officially marking the start of the holiday shopping season, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are significant days in the retail world. And in this increasingly digital world, more and more shoppers are headed online to find gifts, hunt for bargains, and deck the halls.

The 2022 holiday season ushered in new spending levels and more online shoppers than ever. While there were 128 million online shoppers on BFCM in 2021 across the U.S., this number soared to 130 million in 2022. And although shoppers spent an average of $301.27 in 2021, this figure climbed to $325.44 in 2022.

But it wasn’t just digital channels setting records last year. During the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, 196.7 million customers hit the stores online and in person – 17 million more than in 2021. This total is the highest number on record, surpassing the number of expected shoppers by 30 million. This year, inflation is down, the stock market is holding firm, and national sales reports yield surprisingly positive results amid some economic uncertainty. This indicates that consumers anticipate looking for significant discounts and great deals.

The bottom line is that online and omnichannel retailers must be ready for the 2023 holiday shopping season – and now is the time to prepare. After all, there’s no time on Black Friday or Cyber Monday to manually update product details by hand or update prices and promotions simultaneously.

The solution lies in technology – specifically in Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Product Information Management (PIM) tools. Here’s how PIM and DAM solutions can turn the year’s busiest shopping days into a breeze.

Product Information Management: The key to winning Black Friday and Cyber Monday

There’s no time more critical to post accurate pricing and product availability than Black Friday into Cyber Monday – and Product Information Management systems provide all the information needed to store, sell, and ship every product a brand sells.

PIM systems not only take care of organizing the information about each item, but these are also provided with a lot of additional promotional or technical information to increase the sales of the product.

But PIM isn’t just essential to your customers. It’s vital to your entire operation. The process from a customer selecting and purchasing a product based on accurate inventory to making a sale within the eCommerce store can involve a lot of teams and technology solutions. Only some products will have the same metadata strategy if PIM data is imported from multiple manufacturers or other sources.

A robust PIM solution ensures everyone is working on the same team and with the same reliable datasets. Not only does a PIM system help to prevent the mislabelling of products, but it also streamlines workflows for internal and external teams thanks to updated, centralized data. Moreover, digital catalogs can connect customers to available inventory instead of linking them to sold-out products.

Digital Asset Management and Peak Week

Digital asset management is just as important in the time leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday as during this holiday Peak Week. A DAM system is the ultimate asset workflow and production tool – a one-stop shop for preserving, cataloging, sharing, and storing digital assets. These assets include images and documents but also have videos, music, audio recordings, and any other digital assets in your stock.

By having a set system for storing, updating, and accessing these digital assets, you can streamline your workflow, gain a deeper understanding of which assets are most valuable to you, and, in some cases, even automatically update publications with the most recent version of an asset whenever changes are made – which can be a real time-saver during the busy holiday season to ensure assets are updated with the latest metadata and sales information.

When your assets are organised, it’s easier for everyone on your team to work efficiently during the holidays. A DAM solution gives you a centralised way to not only store these assets but also track how and where they have been used, who has access to them, and any licensing information you might need.

Why does this matter for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? An intuitive DAM solution like LAGO by Comosoft can ensure that your entire organisation uses the appropriate assets and automatically updates them throughout Peak Week to match corresponding sales and promotions. With just the click of a button, LAGO allows you to update every instance and usage of a single asset – across websites, digital magazines, and more – without manually changing each one. This capability makes it easier to change investments to fit new branding themes and promotions efficiently – and cuts the risk of missing one in the process.

LAGO by Comosoft: Your Go-To tool for Black Friday and beyond

Having a PIM system before Black Friday is a good idea to navigate the year’s busiest shopping day. Adding a DAM system makes it even better. But choosing a solution that combines these two technologies into one tool that serves your entire team is the best option to come out of Peak Week on top – and that’s precisely what LAGO does, and so much more.

With LAGO by Comosoft, your team not only benefits from managing your inventory data and assets together, but you also have a multifunctional tool that empowers a checkpoint-based, collaborative workflow not just to store assets and manage inventory but also create, proof, approve, and publish digital and print publications, manage versioning control, secure asset access, track product data, and integrate it all with your website, app, and eCommerce store.