Launchpad is a feature that comes standard with any Shopify Plus account. It automates and organizes campaigns for important events including product releases, flash sales, seasonal campaigns and other ecommerce events that fuel your business.
Currently, planning and executing these events in real-time costs a lot of energy, money, resources and downtime. Any merchant managing a high growth ecommerce business knows how frustrating it can be to complete the long stretch of tedious, mind-numbing work ahead of major events such as BFCM, holidays, Valentine’s Day, product launches, etc.
Imagine you’ve just worked a 16-hour day and your Valentine’s Day sale is supposed to end at midnight. You decide to close your eyes for a few minutes and next thing you know it’s 6am and 50+ orders have gone through at the sale price since midnight. Sounds like an expensive nap! Long hours without resting the brain will result in human error.
Launchpad gives Shopify Plus partners the ability to eliminate the manual work required to run their shop on a day to day basis and allows them to focus on what matters, sales.
Merchants can focus on the tasks that require their attention such as, doubling up on marketing efforts, high volume customer service, maintaining inventory, and analyzing profit driven data to name a few.
Launchpad appears as a dashboard while providing an interactive checklist to ensure nothing is missed or delayed.
Here are 9 compelling reasons to use Launchpad to automate promotion events:
- Product Releases: Select specific products or collections to publish for your sale, and release inventory as needed.
- Pricing Discounts/Changes: Merchants can change the price or discount specific collections, products or variants for a scheduled period to run automatically
- Theme Switching: Automatically publish and unpublish a specific theme for the duration of your event. This ability can be particularly useful when your homepage content features information on products related to your event. Roll out changes to colors, content, styling options, images, banners and settings, then change it all back.
- Password Page: Activate a password page for a specific time period. A password page leading up to a highly anticipated product release or flash sale for merchants with smaller SKU counts or limited inventory can build up a lot of hype and generate traffic.
- Inventory Availability: Manage inventory levels at the start of an event down to the variant.
- Manage Multi-channel Listings: Launchpad provides control that extends to publishing and unpublishing select products across select sales channels. You can publish a product to your store but not your social media sales channels.
- Analytics: Another helpful feature included in Launchpad is a real-time analytics dashboard that can highlight critical performance data and customer buying behavior for your event, such as: total sales, orders placed, average order values, best selling products, inventory levels, customer conversion data, top performing marketing channels, etc.
- Bot Protection: For merchants who launch products with limited inventory are often the subject of bots filling orders for the purpose of resale. Launchpad allows you to activate a captcha form to prevent bots from littering your website when launching a new product.
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Shopify Scripts: The real value here comes from combining Launchpad in conjunction with Scripts. Shopify Scripts can interact with line items properties, shipping methods/rates and payment methods/gateways. Launchpad allows you to schedule the publishing of specific scripts, to ensure a script is applied for a promotion. Not something we want to be doing on the fly while the promotion is being sent to tens of thousands of customers. You can prepare pricing models ahead of time, and then watch it roll out seamlessly when the time comes around:
- Shipping: Add discounts to shipping or automatically offer free shipping when a customer spends over $75
- Gifts: Develop line-item scripts to automatically offer a gift with a the purchase of a specific product during the sale
- Tracking customers: Tag customer who have purchased and ordered over $400 or a customer who refunded items that are over $100
- Minimum threshold discounts: These encourage a customer to spend at least a certain amount before being rewarded.
- Bundling items: This incentivises customer to spend a little bit extra by marrying products with those they are already purchasing
- Converting new customers: New customers visiting your store can be automatically be offered a percentage or $ amount off their first purchase
- Targeting VIPs: Identify who your big spenders are and offer them an exclusive sitewide discount without the use of a promocode
To recap, start using Launchpad to reallocate hundreds of hours a year, remove human error from the equation and simplify the execution of your promotion event - scheduling tasks well in advance and rolling them all back when the event is over.
Are you a visual learner? Check out the demo video created by Shopify.
At Pointer, we specialize in working with Shopify Plus merchants to grow your business by creating beautiful and captivating ecommerce experiences for your customers. Let's chat so you can learn more about our power and freedom of ecommerce automation with Launchpad and other Shopify Plus commerce solutions.
