Last year, online holiday sales reached $221.1 billion – a 4.9% increase. Clearly, the holiday shopping season is a perfect time of the year for most e-commerce businesses to dramatically increase sales through holiday spending and win new potential customers.
But if you don’t take the right steps to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they can turn into a disaster. Site downtime, payment problems, loading issues, and more could plague your store, damaging your reputation and your sales.
So, what exactly should you do as part of your preparation for US holidays 2024? Let’s take a look at the top 10 most common points for your online retail sales growth.
1. Apply Marketing Efforts to Build Buzz Ahead of Time
First and foremost, you need to make sure that you’re advertising your holiday sales ahead of time using promo banners, email abandoned cart reminders or newsletters, advanced promotion tools, and social media. If you want to move the most merchandise this holiday shopping season, your customers need to know about your sales – and why they should shop from you.
If you don’t prepare a holiday e-commerce marketing strategy in advance, you’re going to fall behind other e-commerce businesses who did – and that’s never a good thing.
2. Make a Holiday Landing Page
How can your holiday shoppers take advantage of holiday deals if they can’t find them? You should create and promote a dedicated holiday landing page, and place it front-and-center on your website’s homepage. It should only take a single click for holiday shoppers to see your limited-time deals and special offers.
Read More: 15 Christmas Marketing Ideas
3. Get Ready for a Surge in Traffic
Surges in traffic are good – if you’re prepared, that is. If you’re not, they can cause performance issues that may cost you sales. Check if your Magento 2 is ready for holiday season sales by ensuring fast loading (even on a mobile device) and effective caching.
Verify that your web host allows you to scale up your website quickly if you need to. Ideally, you should be able to add more capacity with just a phone call or the click of a mouse, so that you can keep your site running if you encounter an unexpectedly high surge in traffic.
4. Offer Discounts on Popular Items
Yes, discounting an item that’s not selling well is a good way to make sure you break even or maybe turn a little bit of a profit. But if you only discount your unpopular items, online shoppers won’t be happy with the overall quality of your holiday sale.
Trustpilot statistics say that “a totally satisfied customer contributes 2.6 times as much revenue as a somewhat satisfied, and 14 times as much revenue as a dissatisfied one.” So make sure to learn what your most popular items are and provide some holiday discounts on them too.
5. Check if You Have Enough Inventory
Nobody likes to shop for an item and add it to their cart only to find out that it’s out-of-stock or back-ordered. Before the holidays start, you need to think through your merchandising approach and make sure that you’re fully stocked on your most popular items.
By using the data you’ve gathered about your products during holiday shopping 2023 and the rest of the year, you should be able to predict which ones will be the most popular throughout the holidays and stock up accordingly. Better yet, install tools that would let you set minimum in-stock quantity thresholds and notify when you’re running low on inventory way in advance, giving you enough time to replenish.
6. Build Trust with Price History
We know you wouldn’t do this – but a lot of online retailers do. First, you raise the cost of your items a few days before the holiday sale. Let’s say that a $14.99 toy goes to $19.99. Then, you announce your holiday sale and it’s a blowout!
The toy goes from $19.99 to $14.99! Customers are saving 25% on this hot item!
Except they’re not. They’re buying it at the original price – and you’re taking advantage of a psychological trick to make them think they’re getting a good deal.
Sure, this can work – for a little while. But if your customers pay attention to your prices and start to notice that you’re raising prices before sales, you may end up alienating them.
Risking the integrity and reputation of your website isn’t worth making a few extra sales. Use Price History tools to show your customers that you’re committed to honesty. Let them feel in control of their purchasing decisions by checking out how much the item cost a few days, weeks, or months before.
7. Use Free Shipping Promotions
Free shipping is one of the most powerful promotions available. 93% of customers say that they are encouraged to buy more products if free shipping is available, and 58% of customers say that they have added more products to their shopping cart to qualify for a free shipping promotion.
Even if it means that you will have to offer lower overall discounts on some of your items, you should definitely consider implementing a free shipping promotion bar during the next shopping sale.
8. Provide Clear Shipping Dates
Lots of people do last-minute holiday shopping online, so you’ll want to make sure they know whether or not their packages will arrive on time. It’s a good idea to invest in a real-time delivery estimation tool that appears during the checkout process. This tool will allow users to get an estimate for when their package will arrive based on their location and chosen method of shipment.
9. Prioritize Personalization
Providing good products is no longer enough. Streamlining the journey from the moment they came to your Magento 2 website to the point of purchase is not enough either. Customers now demand a consolidated, personalized user experience that doesn't end even at the checkout.
Create highly targeted promotions with the help of segmentation tools. Offer flexibility of present choice with the Gift Card. Thank customers with Free Gifts or Reward Points.
Make your customers feel like people, not a meaningless number in your holiday sales revenue sheet.
10. Prepare for the Returns
Once the holidays are over, you can breathe a sigh of relief, sit back, and start assessing your sales performance, right?
Well, not quite. Forbes says that more than 11% of all items purchased for the holidays are returned – and that means your customer service team is probably about to be hit hard by return requests. You will want to make sure that you have a robust RMA system to handle all the issues that may crop up after the holidays.
Besides, it may be a good idea to spend some time redoing your FAQ pages and the information on your customer self-service portal. Providing answers to customers’ questions without contacting customer support reduces the overall burden on your support team.
Top 10 Apps and Extensions to Boost Holiday Sales
You’ve already got the steps to follow. But to bring these plans to life, you need the right tools to power your efforts. This is where the right Magento extensions can make all the difference.
Let’s explore 10 essential Amasty extensions that will help you streamline your operations, increase conversions, and ensure your store is ready to shine during the holiday rush:
- Google Page Speed Optimizer – Improve website load times to reduce bounce rates.
- Special Promotions – Create eye-catching deals and promotions to increase conversions during the holiday season.
- Promo Banners – Display engaging banners to promote sales, new arrivals, and exclusive offers.
- One-Step Checkout – Reduce cart abandonment by streamlining the checkout process into a single, convenient step.
- Free Shipping Bar – Encourage larger orders via a free shipping threshold during checkout.
- Free Gift – Offer free gifts with purchases to incentivize customers and boost average order value.
- Gift Card – Allow customers to buy gift cards, a perfect solution for last-minute holiday shoppers.
- Gift Wrap – Offer gift-wrapping services to appeal to holiday shoppers.
- Landing Pages – Build targeted landing pages for seasonal campaigns to drive sales.
- Improved Layered Navigation – Help customers quickly find products with advanced filters, boosting conversions during busy seasons.
Treat This Holiday Sale Checklist as a To-Do List
As you head into the holiday season, use this list of 10 rules as a checklist for your e-commerce holiday readiness. But unlike other checklists, this one has no leeway. Sorry to be harsh, but the stakes are big here. You need to do every item on this list.
They’re not hard. They’ll just take some time to set up.
But that time will be well spent. Because you want your shoppers to be “well spent.”
Have a great holiday season!
Want More Tips to Prepare Your Magento Storefront for Sales?
Get this detailed checklist from Amasty’s Black Friday pros – and make sure you’re 100% ready!
Frequently asked questions
The biggest sale days of the year are Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Singles' Day. Prime Day is also gaining prominence, along with major holidays like Christmas and New Year sales.
Christmas generates the most sales, driven by extensive gift buying, holiday promotions, and year-end shopping.
There are more sales before Christmas as retailers push holiday promotions, though post-Christmas sales, such as Boxing Day and clearance events, also see strong activity.
Holiday retail sales forecasts generally predict an increase year-over-year, driven by online shopping, promotional events, and consumer demand, though economic factors may influence specific numbers.
Black Friday falls on the Friday after Thanksgiving in the U.S., typically the fourth Friday of November. Cyber Monday follows right after, on the Monday immediately after Black Friday.
Over 60% of consumers complete a significant portion of their holiday shopping online, with some studies indicating that this figure reaches over 70% during peak seasons.
Boost sales with targeted promotions, personalized offers, early-bird discounts, and optimizing your website for mobile shoppers. Leverage social media campaigns and enhance customer support to drive engagement.
Personalization, offering exclusive discounts, optimizing the checkout process, and implementing retargeting ads are key strategies to boost e-commerce sales, especially during high-traffic business holiday seasons.
E-commerce holiday readiness refers to preparing your online store for peak shopping periods, ensuring optimized performance, seamless checkout, stock management, and creating holiday-specific marketing strategies.
Online shopping typically sees a 20-30% increase during the holiday season, with spikes as high as 50% or more on key shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
