How to Prepare your e-Commerce Shop for Increased Holiday Season Sales
For many small online shops, the Holiday Shopping Season is the busiest time of the year! In this blog, I am going to share some tips to prepare your shop for the rush and increased sales during the Holiday Season! Learn more about what you need to do from product inventory to shipping decisions to marketing your shop!
Start Early!
Every year it seems shoppers start thinking about and searching for holiday gift ideas even earlier. It’s a little crazy how soon it starts BUT you want to be ready. Be there for your customers when they are ready to start shopping. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to offer your products to these early shoppers! What does starting early look like? It means prepping your inventory, making important decisions about sales, shipping policies, packaging and marketing. Read on for details about these important details that will help you prepare your shop for holiday sales!
What Will You Sell?
As you prepare your shop for the holiday shopping season, you need to analyze and determine which of your products will be your most popular. I suggest featuring a few of your popular “standard” products but also trying a few new things. When deciding what you will offer this year, consider a few things:
What are your standards products? The things people know and love you for!
What was popular last year?
Is anything trending in your niche?
What didn’t work last year? What didn’t people buy?
Do you want to try something new?
Select your “Featured Products”. What will you give extra attention to when marketing?
Inventory Prep
As you prepare your shop for the holidays and increased sales, think about what your inventory will look like. Once you decide WHAT you will offer and feature in your shop and what products you think will be the most popular, you need to consider your inventory and how you will stock these items. And then, start to act.
If you are maker:
choose the items you will offer in your shop
decide the volume of the items you will make and sell
create a plan to purchase your materials
determine how long it will take you to create those products
prepare your schedule to give yourself a reasonable amount of time to reach your inventory goal
If you are a reseller
choose the items you will offer in your shop
decide the volume of the items you will purchase to sell
create a plan to purchase your items, do you need to sign agreements with your vendors, do you need to set up payment plans and arrangements?
determine how long it will take you to acquire the products
prepare your schedule to give yourself a enough time to receive your inventory to reach your inventory goal
Determine Your Special Offers
Everyone loves a special or sale! And, the holiday shopping season is a great time to offer your customers a little sale to entice and encourage them to shop with you. Rather than reacting to the market and what other shops are doing, I suggest you plan ahead for your sales. What will make you stand out? What can you afford to offer (do not over offer and regret it later because it wasn’t profitable for you!). Some sale ideas are:
Free Shipping - This can be free shipping on any order, free shipping on a purchase of a certain dollar amount or maybe free shipping on particular “featured” products. I encourage some sort of free shipping option. Big shops are doing it and you don’t want to miss out on a sale because your shipping is too expensive. HINT…increase the price of your item a bit to cover the average cost of shipping. The optics of the free shipping will help you and generally speaking the minor increase in cost won’t hurt your chance of the sale!
Sales or Discounts - If you plan to run any sales or discounts, think ahead to how you will do that. Do you need to create a special code on for your customers to use? Will you do mark downs right on your site? You want to have a clear plan so that when you start to advertise and promote your holiday shop, you have those items ready to go!
Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Shop Small Days - If we are talking about the Fall Holidays, will you be having any Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Small Shop Day specials? Make sure to plan ahead, create your social media posts and any other promotional materials for these days. You will be getting busy during this time so having your decisions made ahead will just make it that much easier.
Establish your Shipping Details and Order Turnaround Times
When preparing for the holiday shopping season, plan your shipping and order details ahead:
Shipping Costs and Free Shipping - As I said above, consider free shipping but only in a way that works for you!
Realistic Order Turnaround - Set realistic, reachable turnaround times for orders and shipments. Be clear with your customers about how long items will take and when they can expect shipments to ship and arrive. Make sure you are giving yourself time to fulfill orders but also do it in a way that is appealing to your buyers.
Set a date for final shipping to meet holiday delivery. It is critical that you pick a date when you can no longer guarantee holiday delivery. Being clear with your customers will ensure everyone is happy with the outcome.
Shipping Supplies - Be prepared with basic shipping supplies such as boxes, tissue, and packing tape. Seems simple but once you get busy, you will be glad you have these items so you can quickly get sales in the mail to your customers.
Events
A lot of small shops like to do local pop ups during the holiday shopping season! It’s a great way to get out and meet new customers and make some sales. If you have the opportunity to do a few of these pop up events each year, I recommend you do it! I find these sales are a great way to do research on what customers are looking for, how they react to a shop’s product offerings and how the shop can improve what is offered for sale. And it’s a great way to introduce your shop to a new audience!
If you will do any pop up events during the Holiday Shopping Season, you need to be prepared with a few things:
Extra inventory for the increased exposure and therefore more sales
A way to accept payment. Will you take credit cards? If you will take cash, bring change.
Bags, Tissue, Business Cards.
Display Items - How will you display your items? Be creative here. Shop your own home and I am sure you can come up with some great ways to display your items for sale!
Packaging
I love the idea of attractive packaging. What I mean is taking basic shipping materials to the next level. I love getting something in the mail, opening it and seeing the unique and special way the vendor packaged the item. I think this is so important as a small shop. That special touch shows your customers that you are a real person, not a warehouse, and that you made an effort to deliver their item in a special way. A few suggestions:
When picking your boxes, tissue and other shipping supplies, consider what makes your shop unique. Think about brand colors and style and be consistent in your packaging.
Consider adorning your boxes, bags and tissue with a sticker with your logo.
Use your brand colors for your tissue.
Always include a custom, hand written thank you note (short and sweet is fine) when it’s possible
Always include your business card. This way, it’s easy for the recipient to remember where they purchased this amazing item and they will have your info when they are ready to come back for more.
Get the Word Out!
How will you share the details about your small shop this holiday shopping season? You need to share your shop, your products, the details of your sales and everything your customers need to know about what to expect from your shop this year.
Social Media: There are all of the regular spots: Instagram and Facebook, TikTok, etc. Get out there and engage with your audience. Tell them what you are offering this Holiday Season. Invite them to shop with you!
Email List - Have you been collecting emails? Please say yes! (If not, that’s a blog for another day). But if you have, get the word out to your loyal customers. Tell them about your plans for holiday sales. Share sale details, coupon codes and all of the good stuff to encourage them to come back and shop!
Pinterest Marketing
Last but not least, my favorite part, you should be using Pinterest to market your shop…year round…and leading up to holiday shopping season. Pinterest is a shopper’s destination. Not only is a place to find information about almost anything, Pinterest has added features especially designed for shopping. There’s the Visual Search, Product Pins, Product Rich Pins, Product Tagging and more!
People come to Pinterest to discover and find solutions to their problems, ideas for gifts, shops to buy from! It is a visual search engine. Be there so that when they search, you show up as an amazing option for their solutions!
Here are a few basics to follow when marketing your shop for the holidays on Pinterest!
Start Early - Believe it or not, people start searching for holiday ideas during the Summer! It’s true. Pins take a little while to make their way around Pinterest. So, start pinning about your shop and products early. Give them time to start circulating and be there when people start searching for your items!
Create Amazing Pins - Create Pins that your ideal customers will click. This means using your keywords and eye catching images when creating pins. Include clear text overlay, a keyword rich title and description and a call to action. You can head to my Perfect Pin blog to learn even more about creating scroll stopping pins (see below for the link). Make sure you are creating pins with different images, different views and most importantly, lifestyle images. Your shoppers want to see your product in use.
Pin Often - Pin from your shop on a consistent basis. Pin several pins for each product or event. Use different styles and images to offer a variety to viewers. And drip your pins onto Pinterest a little at a time and often.
Fresh Pins - Pinterest loves fresh pins so while evergreen pins that work for you year after year are great, be sure to create a batch of fresh pins each season to add some new content to your shop’s Pinterest account.
Wishing you much Success!!!
I hope this info has been helpful for you as you prepare your shop for the Holiday Shopping Season. Please reach out if you have any questions and check out the other blogs listed below for related topics!
Links to other helpful, related blog posts: