Prepare Your Ecommerce Site for Holiday Shopping: A Month-by-Month Guide
Plan for the peak shopping surge with practical tips and advice from experts.
Explore key tasks and moments by month
March:
Run a retrospective of last year’s peak season.
The best roadmap for this year’s holiday success is looking back at what went well — and what didn’t — last year. Identify your top-performing products, customer segments, and sales channels. Look for any trends and consider if there were any spikes or dips in demand. Use this analysis to make decisions about product assortments, inventory levels, and marketing campaigns for the upcoming season.
Pull up a chair and pore over customer feedback. Parse through reviews, social media comments, and support tickets to get a good grasp on customer preferences, challenges, and any areas of discontent. These insights are invaluable for enhancing product quality, customer service, and the overall shopping experience. Pro tip: use generative AI to uncover trends in customer reviews.
Finally, examine website analytics to evaluate how your site performed during the last peak season. Look at traffic patterns, bounce rates, conversion rates, and other key metrics. Identify any bottlenecks or areas of friction that may have caused customers to abandon their journeys. This analysis will help you optimize your website design, user experience, and checkout processes for the next peak season.
Get started with demand forecasting.
Effective demand forecasting is critical for supply chain optimization, cost reduction, and maximizing sales. Accurately anticipating demand will help you ensure that you have the right inventory levels, staffing, and resources in place to avoid stockouts and overstocking. Analyze historical sales data to identify trends and patterns. Consider factors such as seasonality, promotions, and economic conditions (ahem, inflation) that may impact demand. You can also use machine learning and AI to enhance the accuracy of your forecasts. This year may look different, but accurate demand forecasting can consistently keep you seeing holiday success year after year.
Communicate your demand forecast with supply chain partners.
An accurate demand forecast doesn’t mean much if you don’t make your supply chain partners aware of it. A proactive approach and transparency with suppliers, manufacturers, and shipping partners will help you mitigate risks, such as shortages of raw materials or capacity constraints. Sharing your demand forecast early and communicating changes often will foster a more efficient, responsive, and resilient supply chain, which is critical to a successful holiday season.
Syncing up with a last-mile fulfillment partner like Walmart GoLocal can also positively impact supply chain and capacity planning at this stage while adding reliability to one of the most visible parts of the buying experience for customers.
April:
Refine your social commerce strategy.
During the 2023 peak shopping season, mobile commerce made up 65% of global orders, and 10% of site visits were driven by social media. During your holiday retrospective, take a deep dive into how your social strategies performed last year. What was your conversion rate and average order value on social? Look into engagement rates, ad performance, and customer sentiment. This will help you identify whether and where you need to make any tweaks to drive year-over-year growth on your social channels. The right social commerce strategy is critical to maximize sales and extend your brand’s reach this holiday season.
Once you refine your strategy, test the user experience and customer journey. Does it reflect what customers expect from your brand? Verify that your order management system is seeing orders coming in from social media platforms and you are tracking referral traffic from those platforms as well. Social sales don’t exist on an island. They are an arm of your complete commerce strategy and should contribute to your overall knowledge of your customers.
Implement a unified commerce strategy.
At this early stage and with your social commerce strategy defined, there may still be time to implement a unified commerce strategy that goes beyond a typical omni-channel strategy.
So what’s the difference? Omni-channel retail allows brands to sell across various channels and meet customers where they are. This could include social platforms, major online retailers, and/or major brick-and-mortar retail partners. However, the data across these channels may be disconnected. A unified commerce strategy integrates these channels and their data.
The benefits: A single source of truth and better experience for customers. Win-win, right?
May:
Optimize third-party integrations.
Holiday preparation is all about ensuring a smooth, pleasant experience for customers and that extends to any customer-facing third-party integrations. These integrations are responsible for keeping your business up and running. They power payment gateways, shipping providers, inventory management systems, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, marketing platforms, and more.
To optimize them before the holiday season, reduce latency and processing times for transactions and updates. Make sure each integration can handle increased loads during peak traffic. Follow best practices for API optimization and minimize the number of API calls to optimize data retrieval processes.
Shoring up security is also a must. Use version control for monitoring code changes, authentication for user identification of anyone accessing the API, utilize API gateways, and encrypt data transmissions. Optimizing your third-party integrations will improve efficiency for your site and ensure a better user experience across any potential touchpoints.
Doriel Abrahams, Principal Technologist at Forter, says analyzing the data you share with third-party integrations is vital when shoring up security. "You need to review the data you share with third parties and analyze ways to be more efficient. Is it more important that you send less data to save time? Or send more and see better performance and results?"
You need to review the data you share with third parties and analyze ways to be more efficient. Is it more important that you send less data to save time? Or send more and see better performance and results?
Doriel AbrahamsPrincipal Technologist, Forter
Assess payment and checkout systems.
Speaking of third-party integrations: Your payment process and checkout can make or break your peak shopping season — and it’s also one of the most complex parts of a digital storefront. Get started on optimizations early to make it a pleasant, smooth experience for your customers during the holidays. This is crucial for your conversion rates during the holiday season. According to Stripe, “52% of customers will give up on a purchase after two minutes, which is bad news since the average checkout takes three minutes to complete.” To avoid this, update and optimize your payment and checkout process early in the summer. This will allow you to test out any new features or workflows during any sales or traffic surges over the July 4th and Labor Day holidays.
Checkout should be about convenience, and — more importantly — it should be smooth and reassuring. This means a checkout that has as few steps as possible with a reliable online payment solution. One-click checkout is ideal. And offering guest checkout is a must. Flexibility is also important to customers at checkout. Do you have the most popular payment options available? Are you offering buy now, pay later (BNPL) and/or buy online, pay in store (BOPIS)?
Businesses have numerous payment methods to manage, and it can be hard to determine which ones will drive the best results or which will be most popular with customers. According to Stripe, payment installments are increasingly popular. In fact, the payment processor has seen BNPL volume grow 172% in just the past year. According to Abhinav Tiwari, product lead for Stripe’s optimized checkout suite, “Stripe ran A/B tests on more than 150,000 global payment sessions and found that businesses that offer installment payments generate new sales, increase revenue, and boost conversion rates.”
Begin initial load testing.
With your integrations sorted, you can now begin early load testing. We recommend testing early and testing often. At this stage, load testing should include conducting baseline tests to understand your site’s current performance under normal load conditions. Then, gradually increase the load to simulate peak traffic conditions and monitor your system’s performance. Identify issues and develop a plan for implementing fixes, including optimizing code, database queries, caching strategies, and infrastructure configurations.
Adapt to holiday use cases like delivery guarantee, split shipping, split payments, omni-channel coupons, and more.
The demands of the season call for updates to business processes and integrations. Your customers will want reassurance that their orders will arrive in time for specific holidays, among other accommodations like omni-channel coupons. To foster customer loyalty and stay ahead of these expectations, test these functionalities if they’re not already a normal part of your business practices.
The peak shopping season is also a time when customers need a bit more flexibility in checkout and logistics. They’ll greatly appreciate the option for split shipping so they can place one order that routes each item to the appropriate gift recipient (and possibly to their home address if they bought a little something for themselves.) The option to divide cost across multiple payment methods could also be a dealbreaker if not available to potential customers.
Stripe ran A/B tests on more than 150,000 global payment sessions and found that businesses that offer installment payments generate new sales, increase revenue, and boost conversion rates.
Abhinav TiwariHead of Product, Checkout Experiences, Stripe
June:
Perform a security review and optimize fraud prevention.
With six months to go before Cyber Week, it’s time to get your security in order. Review security protocols and implement multi-factor authentication for code uploads if you haven’t already. Make sure your user permissions are updated to avoid any roadblocks for operations — especially for critical roles during peak traffic — and to limit access to only the appropriate modules.
If applicable, review Open Commerce API (OCAPI) or B2C Commerce API (SCAPI) client IDs to ensure administrators who need access have it and that authorization rules are configured appropriately.
This is also a good time to check your IP blocklist (and allowlist) to make sure it’s up-to-date. Review features of your enterprise content delivery network (eCDN) and web application firewall (WAF) to shore up your defense against malicious traffic.
It’s also important to have a gameplan for combating returns fraud as a part of your security checklist. Find out what sort of new tactics were adopted recently by fraudsters from the person or persons in your company responsible for processing returns and adjusting accordingly.
Clean up your data.
Six months out is also a good time to take stock of your data. This may take some advance planning, but once you’re organized proceed with identifying and correcting any errors you may have in customer records. Fill in missing values when possible. An inaccurate lead might as well be no lead. Also remove duplicate entries to avoid embarrassing occurrences like double email blasts, which could turn off a customer for good.
While you’re at it, this is an opportunity to resolve inconsistencies in your data. Define data standards and establish data validation rules if you haven’t yet.
Considering a support partner? Onboard them.
Depending on your onboarding terms, June will likely be the hard deadline to get a support partner situated before the peak shopping season. Consider the back-and-forth that usually happens on the frontend of procurement before a contract even materializes. You get the picture.
If you anticipate a partner will be mission critical, start the conversation earlier than you think you should. Assign someone responsibility for the entire process — from NDA to finance — until you can rest assured that you will have that partner’s support when things get busy.
July:
Optimize search filters, categories, and widgets to streamline product discovery.
So, you’ve attracted shoppers with a fabulous social commerce strategy and a thoughtful approach to ecommerce SEO. That’s great! But it’s only half the battle. You also need to ensure that customers can easily find the products they’re looking for on your site.
A large part of your ecommerce holiday success comes down to product discovery. A few ways to optimize product search? Create category-specific product filters. For example, if you sell apparel and you have an existing “shoe” category, you can add helpful filters that allow shoppers to shop by activity type (running, walking, tennis) or closure type (slip- on, zipper, lace-up). It’s also important to show the right number of filters to avoid overwhelming shoppers. And, above all else, make sure that you never show zero results when a customer enters a product search.
To aid with optimization, merchandisers can use retail automation and AI to serve up promotions and custom product descriptions at scale in real time. Well-organized site navigation with clear, unmistakable categories that point to standalone product listing pages simplify user experience and put your best foot forward. AI personalized search experts Prefixbox recommend highlighting promoted products on as many pages as possible using advanced product listing page features and using carousel-type social banners to link to specific product pages.
Finally, make sure that any customer support widgets like automated chat are functioning properly if you are relying on them for assisted product search.
Build and design holiday-themed content.
There’s a lot of noise leading up to the holidays, so it’s important that your ecommerce marketing stands out. During the summer, your creative, design, marketing, and web teams should determine strategies for holiday-themed landing pages, email marketing campaigns, promotional messaging, and gift guides. The right messaging and content will help you attract new customers and retain them well after the holiday season comes to an end.
Consider using ecommerce AI tools to help with these efforts. For example, you can use generative page designers to design and build personalized landing pages for different audience segments. You can also implement AI to help with promotion management. AI can auto-generate custom offers for email, SMS, and messaging apps based on ecommerce data like order and search history, cart abandonment, and more.
There are also opportunities to wow your customers with new experiences. For instance, Obsess specializes in AI-powered virtual reality (VR) commerce experiences for web, Roblox, and Apple Vision Pro.
Neha Singh, CEO at Obsess, stresses the importance of highlighting your content. “Now that more brands are moving to digitally created stores, we can design the space keeping in mind that they have these different pieces of content and we can highlight them in different ways. We very clearly see from the data that the more content there is for customers to engage with, the longer they stay in the experience and the more they end up shopping. In terms of session time, we have seen increases anywhere from 5x to 13x of the time that they are spending on the ecommerce website combined.”
We very clearly see from the data that the more content there is for customers to engage with, the longer they stay in the experience and the more they end up shopping.
Neha SinghChief Technology Officer, Obsess
August:
Address bottlenecks like cart abandonment in real time.
No customer journey is perfect, but you can get pretty close by identifying moments where customers seem to lose momentum towards a purchase. Are they abandoning their cart when they see the price with shipping and tax? Is a discount code falling flat? Identify any issues with your conversion rate optimization early so you can adequately address them before the holiday season.
One of the most critical ways to avoid cart abandonment? Fast page load times — especially for mobile. During peak shopping season, it’s important to ensure the uptime and reliability of your site. Make sure your images are optimized for size and format. Enable browser caching so site elements don’t need to be reloaded for returning customers. Avoid redirects whenever possible. And consider implementing lazy loading, a web development technique that delays loading certain parts of a web page until they are needed.
Execute performance and load testing.
One of the most foundational parts of a successful holiday season is a site that can scale for peak traffic. It’s important to make sure your site won’t collapse under server stress and that your customers don’t experience a sluggish storefront. Just a few moments of website downtime during peak traffic can take a big chunk out of your yearly revenue.
To avoid this scenario, run performance and load tests — and do it early. You can begin planning load testing in August and undertake testing in September or October, but we recommend not putting off until tomorrow what you can do today. This will help you identify any bottlenecks when it comes to site speed so you can apply any necessary code changes before the holiday season begins. Typical culprits of subpar performance include poor caching techniques, common development mistakes, and not optimizing image sizes on product listing and product detail pages.
September:
Assess and update your return policy.
When it comes to your return policy and strategy, businesses have a lot to balance. You need to consider customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and cost-effectiveness — and sometimes these factors seem at odds. Here’s a good rule of thumb: If the lifetime value of your average customer is far greater than your average order value, you should be more customer-conscious with your strategy. This translates to a more lenient policy with longer return windows, few exclusions, and little to no fees. If the opposite is true, it’s a good indicator that you may want to decide on a policy that’s a bit stricter and more focused on minimizing the cost of returns.
Communicate anticipated load with your vendors.
Now that you’ve performed load testing and forecasting, you can start conversations with your vendors to give them an idea of your anticipated orders, and verify that they are equipped to handle that load as well.
October:
Establish Roles and Responsibilities metrics (RACI) for peak support teams across internal organizations, consultants and third parties.
It’s October and you’re coming down the holiday home stretch. Now it’s time to establish project management and identify who will be Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) for your peak support team tasks. This helps you facilitate a smooth and effective operation during one of the most critical support periods of the year.
First, list each major task (such as planning and strategy, support staffing, support system maintenance, and more). Then decide which roles should be involved in each task, and in what capacity. Here’s an example of what a RACI matrix can look like for holiday preparation:
Josh Smiley, VP and Head of IT at pop culture lifestyle brand Funko stresses the importance of aligning your technology and business teams to prepare for the season. “Define clear ownership across teams to prepare across your organization. Holiday readiness is a company-wide project, driven proactively,” Smiley advises.
Define clear ownership across teams to prepare across your organization. Holiday readiness is a company-wide project, driven proactively.
Josh SmileyVP and Head of IT, Funko
Define communication and escalation processes for internal teams, vendors and third parties.
By October, most of your holiday planning is behind you. And it’s important to have contingency plans in place in case any issues occur. Clearly communicate and document a process for escalating bugs and support issues that takes into account who will be available to help due to holiday vacation.
Apply these same principles across vendors and third parties that factor into your holiday success. For any mission- critical integrations, identify administrators or account managers (as well as their backfills) who will be on-call during Cyber Week and are committed to troubleshooting any issues that might arise.
November:
Implement a sitewide holiday moratorium.
Cyber Week is almost here. It crept up, didn’t it? Time to roll with what you’ve got. Institute a code freeze by November 1st as a safe rule of thumb to prevent any unanticipated issues during the most important shopping days of the season. Minimize change to your platform to keep it as stable as possible through the beginning of January.
Now, you are ready. You are well on your way to ecommerce success over the holiday season.
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