Set your online store up for success this holiday season with our free downloadable workbook.
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The shopping season between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day is traditionally the busiest of the year for brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S., and it’s no different for ecommerce businesses. While Black Friday marks the official start to the holiday shopping season, the entire fourth quarter is one of the biggest times of year for sales.
Many people start shopping for holiday gifts in October, before Halloween, as they make holiday purchases, and gifting extends into February for Valentine’s Day. Attracting new customers and attention takes time, so it’s important to start preparing early in the year.
Here are five tips to help you get ahead of the busy holiday season and continue your success into 2025.
1. Prep your online store for holiday shoppers
If you’re just starting an ecommerce store, you can get set up quickly with a website builder like Squarespace. Choose a website template to customize or create a custom one and add your products or import them from another platform.
Once your site is up and running:
Check your inventory. Keep an eye on your stock levels and know your most popular items so you don’t run out and know what to promote in your marketing.
Add seasonal products. This can include simple additions like gift wrapping services, greeting cards, or gift cards. Suggest them to shoppers as add-ons or related items.
Sync with third party tools. These can sync your store with Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Google, so you can reach more customers where they’re searching for gifts.
Boost your SEO. Consider where you can optimize your site for search, like in product descriptions, site descriptions, or blog posts.
Review your website. In addition to SEO, make sure your website is easy to navigate and use. Try going through the full shopping and checkout experience to make sure it’s clear and simple.
Seasonal products to consider
Think about adding popular holiday gifts to your store for the season. In addition to gift cards and other common holiday items, consider adding other options that fit your business.
Set up a subscription option for popular or giftable products, like a Coffee of the Month club.
Offer giftable access to a membership site where you post exclusive content, like video demos that pair with your cooking content or a members-only newsletter.
Add gift certificates to your booking tool so people can give the gift of your workshops, retreats, or personal services.
See the full guide to prepping your site for the holiday season
2. Streamline payments and holiday shipping
The smoother this experience is, the more likely someone is to complete a purchase. A good customer experience also increases the chances someone will be a return customer or recommend you to someone else.
Once you’ve gotten your products set up, focus on the buying experience:
Customize your checkout page. Match your design to your branding. A checkout page that looks professional will help new customers trust your business.
Choose a payment tool that offers flexibility. Connect a payment solution, like Squarespace Payments, that gives shoppers multiple payment options, including familiar brands like Klarna and PayPal.
Set up sales tax calculation. Connect your site to a tool that automatically calculates sales tax based on your customers’ location, like TaxJar, for accuracy.
Offering multiple payment options and a well-designed checkout process both make it more likely for visitors to convert. If they can use a buy now, pay later service or quickly enter shipping details, it removes friction from the buying process.
Confirm your shipping and pickup policy
Clear and accurate fulfillment information is especially important during the holidays, when customers count on you to get gifts to them or their loved ones. Before the holidays start, take a look at a few key details:
Decide how you’ll fulfill orders. Ensure you know which carriers you’ll use to ship orders and their pricing. Some website plugins can help you compare rates, or you can print UPS and USPS labels from a Squarespace site.
Consider local pickup or local delivery. If you sell in person or want to hand-deliver orders, you can offer a local pickup or local delivery option at checkout.
Check your shipping and return policy. Make sure your policy is easy to find and clear about delivery timelines, rates, and guidelines for returning merchandise.
Confirm any shipping deadlines. Get shipping date cut-offs from your carriers ahead of any major holidays so you can highlight them for customers on your site and in emails.
Squarespace users can also create fulfillment profiles to set shipping rules for individual items, streamlining your workflow and avoiding customer confusion. For example, you can set a specific item as in-person pickup only, or set flat rate shipping and country availability for other items.
Learn how to optimize holiday selling, shipping, and fulfillment
3. Create a holiday marketing strategy
Use a marketing strategy to officially set your goals for the holiday season and make a plan to reach them. This doesn’t have to be a complex plan, but set at least one measurable goal, and decide who you’ll reach out to, how, and when. If you’re stuck on ideas, look to your past marketing successes for inspiration. Or experiment with one of the options below.
Email marketing: Promotional emails are one of the most important tools a business owner has. Use your mailing list to promote discounts or popular items. Squarespace Email Campaigns has holiday-themed templates for you to customize, including a set designed to build anticipation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
On- and off-site promotion: Market your products where your target customer is most likely spending their time. That includes website banners, search engines, and social media like Instagram and TikTok.
Add website features: A simple change, like turning on abandoned cart recovery to bring shoppers back to your website after they exit without buying, or limited availability labels on low-stock items can help to increase your sales.
Make sure to update discounts and promote them during major retail sales holidays. You can quickly get images for promos in the Squarespace iOS app. Designs are made based on your branding and products, so you don’t have to spend time creating images yourself. If you find yourself stuck on copy for your marketing, you can use Squarespace AI to generate first drafts in emails and on your website.
Get more tips for your holiday marketing strategy
4. Build a strategy for rewarding customer loyalty
Making a great impression counts when it comes to building loyalty to your store. During the holidays, you might get more first-time customers, so it’s worth ensuring that you’re set up to create a lasting, positive impression.
There are a few places to give special attention during the busy season.
Return policies: A clear return policy and process is important for building trust, especially when someone’s getting a gift for another person. If you make the return process easy, they’ll feel more comfortable buying from you in the future.
Mailing lists: Give shoppers the option to join your email list at checkout and elsewhere on your site. This is an opportunity to stay connected and turn a single purchase into a return customer.
Word-of-mouth praise: Encourage customers to share your items on social media and tag you. That sharing is social proof that others should check out your business, which we’re all more likely to trust than advertising. Resharing or liking their posts is also a way to connect with them more personally.
In addition to a post-holiday rise in returns, you may see lower sales in January. If you have leftover inventory to move, promote a discount code to your mailing list and social media followers. This will have the bonus effect of reminding customers of the great experience they had at your store and catching them after major holiday sales are over.
Read more about building year-round customer loyalty
5. Analyze your holiday sales performance
When the holiday rush is over, take some time to review how it went. Return to the goals you set in your marketing strategy and measure whether you met them. There are a few analytics tools that you can use to find out which of your pages get the most views, where your visitors come from geographically, and which pages or products are more popular.
For the most popular products, ask yourself whether you spent more time working on the product listing or polishing the product images, and whether you promoted them more through email or social media. Keep track of the marketing tactics you used to find out which part of your strategy was the most effective.
For a deeper dive into what worked and what didn’t for your store during the holiday season, visit the purchase funnel panel in the Analytics section of your Squarespace account dashboard. This panel breaks down the journey of a sale into a four-step process.
Visited website
Viewed product
Added to cart or started checkout
Purchase complete
This way, you can see where interest seems to be turning into sales most often and where people tend to drop off. This can give you a sense of which products you should continue to invest in and which products you might need to rethink. Carry these learnings into the rest of the year.
Follow our checklist for success before, during, and after the holidays
This post was updated on August 14, 2024.