How to Save Time Automating Major Sales Events, Campaigns & Product Releases with Launchpad

Just flip a switch … and start minting money. Isn't that the dream of every merchant preparing for a flash sale, product drop, or major sale? Unfortunately, the laborious and manual backend processes necessary to successfully execute events can take weeks of preparation. In fact, your pre-launch to do list can often distract you from your day to day duties and even require you to take your store offline while planning and manually implementing the mechanics of your event. What if none of that was necessary? We feel your pain and it's why we're excited to offer Launchpad, a tool that can help you plan and automate all of the activities necessary to execute your next flash sale or major sales campaign ...

It can be as draining and stressful as cramming for a final exam ... 

We’re talking about preparing for a flash sale, launching a new product, or kicking off a sales campaign.

Each one often requires all-nighters — fueled by caffeine and plagued by the frustrations that stem from the laborious and time-consuming pre-event activities necessary to execute successfully.

Your pre-launch to-do list is lengthy …

Especially when you’re struggling to stay awake at two in the morning before the launch and checking all of the boxes necessary to ensure everything goes off without a hitch. Even worse, you often have to briefly take your store offline to publish the new campaign or sales theme.

And yet, events like flash sales are the lifeblood of high-volume and high-growth ecommerce.

They should generate buzz, move inventory, and grow your business — not cost you energy, money, and downtime. Put a bit differently, the more time you spend planning for these types of events the less time you spend actually generating sales or working on more important tasks.

What if grueling all-nighters and tedious manual work suddenly became relics of the past?

Put Major Ecommerce Events On Autopilot

“This is why Launchpad is our savior,” says Brittney Bowles, Director of Marketing and Ecommerce at Frankies.

“We schedule everything during normal business hours and Launchpad does all of the work for us automatically.”

Launchpad is an exclusive tool for Shopify merchants that allows you to schedule, coordinate, and execute major commerce events in advance. With Launchpad you can pre-plan everything on your to-do list and instantly roll it all back once the sale or event is over.

And everything means everything.

Launchpad empowers you to schedule theme changes, product releases, special discounts, multi-channel listings, and even checkout captcha to prevent bots from placing orders … automatically.

Businesses have already used it to sell more than $3 billion on autopilot.

For instance, when Frankies Bikinis — a global destination for fashion-forward boho-chic beachwear — launches a new product, employees used to work frantically behind the scenes manually changing homepage images, videos, and making the new collection live.

Recently, though, the company began using Launchpad to pre-plan and automate product launches. In addition to saving time, a recent Launchpad-powered product release generated $150,000 in sales in one hour with one style selling out in two minutes.

Your Command Center

Merchants using Launchpad liken its next-generation reporting as something that’s literally out of this world …

“It’s like NASA’s command and control center,” is how Chris Tran, Engineer at 100% Pure, puts it.

“The live reporting is amazing. It’s a one-stop-shop that offers everyone the same view and keeps us all on the same page.”

Think of Launchpad as your command center for major commerce events: the place where customer-facing automation and reporting meet. The analytics dashboard allows you to monitor event performance in real time: total sales and orders placed, inventory levels, and average order values:

Shopify merchants can access Launchpad from their Shopify Admin page and automate complex commerce events such as:

• Changing product prices for a predetermined time frame
• Auto-publishing select products to your online store and across multiple sales channels
• Increasing inventory levels at the start of an event
• Locking a store prior to a sales event to build hype and anticipation
• Scheduling creative changes and theme customization to highlight exactly what customers should see

In the words of Shopify Director of Product David Moellenkamp:

“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.”

“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. This helps preempt the guesswork and time management constraints of this approach and allows our merchants to focus their time and energy on other aspects of their business.”

You Sleep While Launchpad Works

Six-figure product launches like Frankies’ are great for the bottom line …

But Launchpad also provides something no amount of money can buy: a great night’s sleep.

Instead of painstakingly working into the wee hours preparing 100% Pure’s site for a major sale or campaign so as not to disrupt shoppers during normal business hours, Chris Tran — an engineer at the company — recently began using Launchpad to automate major events for all four of the brand’s sites:

Before Launchpad it was a lot of work and it was all manual. On a scale of 1-10, it’s a 15. It’s extremely tedious.

In addition to making the company more efficient, Launchpad’s live dashboard allows Tran and his team to make real-time adjustments that lift sales. Since using Launchpad to automate major sales events which also frees Tran to focus on more important work, 100% Pure has achieved the following:

• Saving 12 hours per sale or campaign
• Reallocating hundreds of hours a year
• Automating sales and campaigns is helping fuel 40% YOY growth

“Launchpad saves us a bunch of time,” Tran says. “Instead of doing all of that tedious manual work I can now focus on more important work like mining our analytics to discover patterns that’ll help increase sales.”