Setting up your Shopify store for BFCM 2022 on SFN
BFCM and the holiday shopping season can be especially challenging times to keep up with customer demand. Setting up your store and Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) app to meet those challenges typically involves areas such as:
- Demand forecasting and inventory management
- Order and fulfillment management workflows
- Fraud prevention measures
- Providing easier returns for customers
Whether BFCM and the holiday shopping season is the busiest time of year for your business or not, the high volume of activity across fulfillment and shipping networks have an impact on your business that you should prepare for. Review the information on this page to understand what actions you might need to take to prepare your Shopify store for BFCM and the holiday shopping season.
On this page
Review your store contact preferences
To help ensure that SFN can contact the right person at your business if there are any delays or issues with fulfilling your orders, review your contact preferences in the SFN app to ensure that the information is accurate.
Review and update your expected orders regularly
To help ensure that SFN can support increases in fulfillment volume, it's important to review and update your expected orders regularly. Keeping your expected orders information up-to-date enables SFN to optimize the network for faster delivery to your customers.
Learn more about reviewing and updating expected orders.
Set up fraud prevention for your store
Fraudulent orders can cause your business to lose money to chargebacks. The built-in fraud analysis uses machine learning algorithms to help bring suspicious orders to your attention. To help prevent fraud you can also configure the following on your store:
- Install Shopify Flow and then create a Flow to hold high risk or high value orders.
- Install the free Shopify fraud filter app.
By setting up a flow that places high risk or high value orders on hold, you can ensure that you have enough time to manually review high risk and high value orders before SFN fulfills them. To help quickly find orders that are on hold, you can create a hold order view that displays all orders in an On hold status.
Set up a fulfillment delay
If you want to ensure that you have time to review orders before fulfillment requests are sent to SFN, then you can set up a fulfillment delay. A fulfillment delay will place fulfillment requests in a Pending state for the amount of time that you choose when configuring the delay. At the end of the delay period, the fulfillment request is automatically sent to SFN.
To help you manage orders that you need to review, you can create an order view to quickly access all orders in a Pending status.
Setting up returns to SFN fulfillment centers
To help you manage returns during the BFCM and holiday shopping season, consider enabling your customers to send returns to SFN fulfillment centers. Products that are returned to SFN are inspected and processed in accordance with the return rules that you set up in the SFN app, and whether the product is an unsellable or restricted item. Enabling customers to send returns directly to SFN helps to ensure that products in a sellable condition are returned to available inventory quickly.
Activate SFN return processing
From your Shopify admin, click Settings > Apps and sales channels.
From the Apps and sales channels page, click Shopify Fulfillment Network.
Click Open app.
Click Settings.
In the Returns section, click Activate.
After you activate return processing, you're able to manually create a return label to provide your customer. Returns are billed on your SFN invoice and your rates can be accessed on your SFN rate card.