Can you believe it’s that time of year already?! The craziness of Back to School, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Boxing Day is starting! Fortunately for you, there’s still a little bit of time to get prepared so that when the holidays do come, the stability of your business won’t be jeopardized. In order to have a successful holiday season, it’s imperative that you not only prepare your site, but your support team as well. So what are the key do’s and don’ts to get started? Check out this presentation to learn the most important things to consider in order to ensure a successful holiday season!

1. Beat the Holiday Rush
Graham Leckie, VP Operations
Demac Media
Preparing your eCommerce Store
for the busiest time of the year

2. Overview
• What the Holidays Mean
• Code Freeze and System Infrastructure
• Inventory and Fulfillment
• Marketing Campaigns
• Sales and Merchandising
• Staff and Customer Awareness
• Planning ahead - 2015

3. DID YOU KNOW?
THERE ARE ONLY
140 DAYS
UNTIL CHRISTMAS?!

4. What constitutes the
“Holidays?”

5. What the Holidays Mean
• Black Friday
• Cyber Monday
• Christmas
• Boxing Day

6. Code Freeze and
System Infrastructure

7. Code Freeze and System Infrastructure
• Make sure to have all development and
testing completed by mid-October
• Table any new development ideas for
execution during the season for
implementation on staging
• Risk Mitigation – know what to do if the site
goes down
• Stress Testing ahead of time

8. Inventory and Fulfillment

9. Inventory and Fulfillment
• Make sure that correct counts are in place to
limit customer service issues
• Should already have buying complete
• Separate eCommerce inventory
• Ability to pull from warehouse or store levels

10. Marketing Campaigns

11. Marketing Campaigns
• Email
– Do not send a blast to the whole list at once
– Test all links before going out from an external
environment if possible
– NEVER use a search string!
– Cached pages
– Tell a story, not just the sale (higher value items)
– Mobile Friendly
• SEM
– Preplan adwords
– Text vs Display with Social

12. Sales & Merchandising

13. Sales and Merchandising
• Make sure that all content is in place before
the 11th hour
• Index/Cache Completed
• Cross-sell/up-sell for loss leaders – attach!
• Drive traffic as well from social media
• Specific holiday categories
• Rich descriptions and content to differentiate

14. Staff Awareness

15. Staff and Customer Awareness
• Make sure that they know what the holidays
mean – especially for new employees
• Incentives for extra hours – pizza, liquid
refreshers, coffee
– Saves from them having to go offsite
• Customer service is key, know how to make a
customer happy
– Replacement for ‘hot’ items that go out of stock
– They are stressed as well!
– Shipping and Returns
• SMILE!

16. 2015 and beyond….

17. Planning Ahead - 2015
• What to do to fill in the valley
• Incentives for return shoppers in the new year
• Gift Cards
• Deploy what was in development over the
holidays
– New Features/Functionality
– Code Audit/Clean up

18. ?
Questions?
Graham Leckie, VP Operations
Demac Media