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No there hasn’t been some strange temporal anomaly – Christmas is not happening in July this year! But it is the time when ecommerce marketers should begin thinking about Christmas.  Remember last Christmas when your staff struggled to cope with the (very welcomed) deluge of last minute holiday orders?  Remember those late nights with the IT department looking at graphs of server CPU usage? (And asking yourself, “Why am I in this meeting?”!) Well those good times are on their way again and it’s less time now to Christmas 2007 than it was since Christmas 2006.  Are you ready?

A successful online holiday shopping season begins with plenty of early planning and prep work.  Think for a moment about how many orders you processed last holiday season?  And I’m not talking about orders for the month of November and December as a whole; I mean your busiest week before the holidays – how busy was it?  Factor normal year over year growth and hopefully the added increase from your successful marketing campaigns to drive more traffic to your site and you could be looking at 10-25% more orders this year. I bet you’re remembering that CPU usage graph now!  This year, will your shoppers be greeted with a well performing site with plenty of inventory and a seamless order process, or are things a little less certain in your mind?

So what can you do to get ready?  First, plan.  Estimate your peak hourly, weekly and monthly order and site visitor numbers for the holiday season.  Talk with your IT team or ecommerce vendor now to be sure they are ready for you.  Work with your supply chain vendors or fulfillment locations to make sure they know your holiday order forecasts and can plan for the additional processing. 

Second, that new whiz-bang dynamic-personalization, recommendation engine, user generated, web 2.0 widget you’re planning on adding to your site this year better be ready well in advance of the holidays.  Most companies “black out” the holidays for major IT work – and for good reason.  The last thing you want to do two weeks before Christmas is roll out a new feature on your site that causes instability.  It’s no sense having the latest buzz word trend in ecommerce on your site if basic shopping suffers. 

And finally, think about your customers and their shopping experience in that frantic pre-Christmas rush.  Make sure you provide them with the right offers and products and gift solutions and let them know key shipping dates and order terms so that they have the right information early enough to make informed buying decisions.

Here at Truition it’s Christmas in July for us.  We’ve been busy over the last couple of weeks planning our holiday season strategies.  Surviving your own successful holiday online shopping season is incredibly difficult – doing it for more than 100 of the world’s leading ecommerce sites takes a lot of skill and planning. But thankfully, we’ve got a great team here who can’t wait for Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

Posted at 01:08 PM in Site Design & Usability | Permalink