25 tips for the holiday eCommerce peak season

We’re about to enter the busiest time of the year for retail – peak season. The perfect storm of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, spell opportunity if you’re running a retail business, but a lot can go wrong, especially if you’re not prepared.

A lack of preparedness could be anything from not having the right discounts in place, to not giving customers the shipping options they expect at the checkout. Regardless of what it is, taking the time to stress-test your business, processes and systems now will save you lost sales when Black Friday finally rolls around.

So, how’s your holiday readiness? If you’re feeling like there’s still a million and one things to do, then check out our list of tips.

1. Prepare a sales plan

Let’s start with something simple: it’s important that you have a sales plan for the holiday season. What are your goals through the end of the year? For example, you might want to set some targets around attracting new customers or retargeting old customers.

It sounds basic, but defining a basic sales plan can help you craft the right promotions and packages, inform which products you push and your marketing strategy.

3. Simplify your checkout process

Want to push more customers through to a purchase? Remove barriers in your checkout process - remove unnecessary fields from the main form and navigation. It’s always a good idea to run some user testing too – have family and friends go through the process of buying a product (and watch them) so you can see where they get stuck.

Just remember that you are not your user – what may seem intuitive to you could actually be costing you sales!

4. Make sure your website is ready for the extra demand

“There is a direct relationship between page load speed and revenue”. That’s according to the CIO of Guidance, Jon Provisor. This means speed and security. Make sure your website is reliable heading into peak season, despite how much traffic comes through. Downtime means lost revenue.

Sticking with reliable providers for your website hosting, eCommerce platform, eCommerce frontend and shipping is the best way to avoid any hiccups.

Note: Peak season isn’t a great time to experiment with your website. If you’re going to make changes, make sure you test them out before you see increased customer volume.

6. Use shipping automation to save time and money

Shipping can be a huge bottleneck during peak season – but it doesn’t have to be. Using shipping automation software can save you money and minutes on every order and help you to get home on time on Black Friday!

Starshipit is a centralised shipping automation platform that integrates with your eCommerce sales channels and couriers, allows you to automatically print shipping labels, autocorrect invalid addresses, easily manage returns and keep your customers in the loop with branded tracking and shipping notifications.

Here’s what one Starshipit customer said about peak season after implementing Starshipit:

“Black Friday was a breeze this year. It was an absolute pleasure. The fruits of all the work that we did really paid off in our busiest time. We pretty much cruised through – but pumped out significant amounts more.”

8. Allow for order personalisation

The holidays are a manic time for everyone, including your customers, so anything you can do to make their lives easier is appreciated. Offering things like gift cards, personalised messages and gift wrapping at checkout can simplify things massively.

The more you can do to make your customers’ lives easier (especially during peak season), the higher the chance of seeing them come back next year.

9. Plan your post-purchase loyalty communications ahead of the peak

LoyaltyLion's recent consumer research shows that shoppers are most likely to sign up to a loyalty program within a day of making a purchase (41%), quickly followed by 2-3 days (31%), so get your loyalty messaging out in your post-purchase communications and hit customers when they’re most receptive.

10. Give your teams the tools they need to stay productive

Efficiency is the name of the game during peak season. You need to give your teams the tools they need to save time on the repeatable tasks and give them more time to spend on the things that matter – like taking care of customers and getting orders out the door.

Automation can be a big help here, especially when it comes to shipping. For example, automated fulfilment platforms can reduce handling time, create packing slips, shipping manifests and more. Then, once orders are out the door, automatic branded tracking and shipping notifications can keep customers in the loop while reducing enquiries to your support team. More on this below...

12. Get in contact with your couriers to stay on top of peak period SLAs

Service level agreements (or SLAs) categorise the estimated or promised shipping times for orders. For example, same day, overnight or weekend). Couriers often have these in place so retailers know what to expect.

Heading into peak season, it’s a good idea to reach out to your couriers as they’ll be able to tell if they're expecting delays and what they think the average transit times might. This can help you to proactively update your checkouts and avoid people getting annoyed about unplanned delays.

Staying in contact with your couriers also means you’ll stay in the loop around delays and can make quick changes to your shipping policy. More on how to action this below.

13. Update your shipping policy timeframes based on your courier SLAs

So you’ve reached out to your couriers (like Australia Post and DHL) and now you’ve got an idea of their transit times and possible delays. What next?

Well, the best course of action is to feed this information back to your customers by updating your shipping policy as well as your shipping options at checkout. During the holiday rush, your customers want certainty around when they’ll receive their orders.

15. Take advantage of integrations

Heading into the holiday eCommerce season, why do more work than you already have to? Integrations between your existing platforms can save you time, stress and even money. Let’s see how.

1. A customer places an order through your Shopify online store.
2. Through an integration, these orders automatically move into your automated shipping and fulfilment platform.
3. Orders get assigned to different couriers based on rules you set (weight, location, express, international and more), without you having to log in to different courier platforms.
4. Once the order ships, the details writeback to Shopify.

Through smart software and simple integrations, you’ve just saved hours per week.

16. Reflect on last year's staffing requirements (Hire temps if required)

How did you go with staffing during the last peak season? Chat to your team. If you get a sense that some additional help could’ve eased the strain, then look at bringing in some temporary help over the busy period.

The old adage of working smarter not harder also applies here; if you can automate some repeatable tasks with technology, give them a go!

18. Plan your peak season discounts now

We touched on the importance of a sales plan earlier, but you also need to think about the discounts you’re going to offer during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Discounts, as you’re certainly aware, are a great way to increase conversions and retention rates (when implemented correctly).

Here are some effective discount strategies:

• Use discounts as incentives, requiring customers to take action in order to use the discount. For example, you could offer a discount for first-time buyers.
• Offer time-based discounts focused around Black Friday and Cyber Monday – which can help with your marketing.
• Offer volume-based discounts, encouraging customers to spend more.
• Implement discount codes at key points. For example, send emails to customers who’ve abandoned their shopping carts with discounts encouraging them to return.
• Offer free shipping. More than a great way to stand out from competitors, free shipping is a solid way to avoid cart abandonment.

19. Ensure your support team is ready

You can do a lot to prevent customers coming through to your support team, like implementing automatic shipping notifications and branded tracking pages, but the peak season always means higher call and email volumes. So, what can you do?

Look at your rosters from last year and use that as the basis for planning this year. What’s changed in the business? Has your support team grown or shrunk? Are you estimating a particularly busy period? Asking yourself these questions can help to guide decisions around bringing in temporary workers.

And, of course, technology is a huge help. Making your self-service experience as seamless as possible will help to keep customers moving through without bogging down your team.

20. Add personalisation to your site with SKU merchandising

Create personalised experiences for your individual customers using software like SearchSpring. These types of tools allow you to offer custom products based on previous searches, and also send those infamous “We think you might like” emails.

With your customers having no shortage of options when shopping online, anything you can do to personalise your offering and stand out will help you become the preferred offering.

One study found that 42% of top eCommerce websites lack category-specific filter types. Another study found that 16% of analysed websites provided a good filtering experience.

Check out this great guide here to learn more, including the benefits of certain filtering options.

22. Ensure you can meet your delivery options, e.g. same day and express

Your customers want choice when it comes to delivery options – but you need to ensure that you’re able to meet these options. We’ve found the best approach is usually identifying the couriers best able to meet your timeframe requirements, and then using shipping software and smart rules to auto-assign orders to the right courier as soon as customers click “buy now”.

In practice, this might mean that you offer same day delivery in Sydney using Uber and weekend delivery using Australia Post.

23. Can your ship from store network handle the increased volume of foot traffic as well as online orders?

Small retailers often find the ship from store model useful as they won't typically have a distribution centre, instead using a few retail stores to ship from store. But during peak season, you need to work out whether you can service both the traffic coming through the store and through your website.

Shipping software can make things easier. In store, staff simply need to access one dashboard on a computer, where they can print orders with a few clicks. Then, the software passes the relevant information across to your couriers and updates the source system with tracking data and order status.

25. Use shipping and fulfilment software to autocorrect addresses

Within a shipping and fulfilment platform, you have a tool that can correct invalid addresses automatically. It's really simple – you can filter orders to only show those with incorrect addresses, and then simply click the auto-correct button. You can then review changes update addresses in bulk.

Auto-correction is an impressive time-saver, removing the need to look up addresses on third-party sites or contact customers to confirm. Address validation minimises the chance of delays and helps to ensure deliveries arrive when they’re supposed to.

Good luck for peak season!

Check out our other holiday eCommerce content that we’ve put together to help you prepare for peak season. If you want to make shipping a breeze this year and get your evenings and weekends back, you can try Starshipit for free for 30 days.