5 Keys to Preparing an eCommerce Business for the Holidays

“During key time periods in the last holiday season... more than 70% of online holiday buyers say that they purchased online instead of in stores because deals online were better.”Sucharita Mulpuru, Forrester

There’s no more important time of the year in eCommerce than the holiday season. In 2011, the months of November and December were responsible for $471.5 billion in retail sales in the U.S., with a large percentage of that taking place online. Signs point to 2012 delivering even more retail growth, with retailers increasing inventory imports in preparation for another banner holiday season.

Businesses that are prepared for the online holiday rush are likely to be those that see the greatest positive impact to their bottom line. Being prepared—by having a site that can handle the traffic, holding sufficient inventory, and adequately advertising—can mean increased sales as online shoppers flock to eCommerce retailers who best meet their holiday shopping needs.

The team at Amazon Webstore, that works with sellers and retailers inside and outside Amazon, has put together five important tips for preparing your eCommerce business for the holidays.

1. Start Now

Whenever you’re reading this—be it August or December—it’s probably time to be preparing your business for the holiday rush.

The reality of the holidays is that every part of your business needs to be ready, and it’s also the time of year when you and your employees tend to be the busiest. Being prepared, however, means more than just scaling individual pieces of the business, by upping the inventory levels, increasing warehousing resources, and adjusting the product catalog.

The businesses who are best prepared for the holidays are those who start by crafting the experience they want their customers to have—and then letting that guide the backend augmentation to support it. For example, if a key tenet of a company’s holiday strategy is improved shipping options, it may mean backing that up with outsourced logistics. Emphasizing a one-day sale may mean launching a temporary microsite, insulating the main corporate site from the influx of holiday-specific traffic.

All of these backend upgrades take time to complete, which is why starting well in advance is the only way to maximize your holiday season success.

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Don’t fall behind!Every business has different needs, but here are some key holiday milestones you’ll likely want to keep pace with:

AugustRamp up inventory ordering

SeptemberVerify your

platform will be able to handle holiday traffic

OctoberBuild holiday

content info your online store

NovemberLaunch broad-scale holiday marketing

DecemberFocus on delivering a good customer

experience

Further, there’s a bevy of possible holidays to focus on during the extended holiday season. The so-called “Cyber 5”, comprising the Thursday-through-Monday span that includes Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, is the appropriate focus for businesses whose strategy includes heavy discounting and moving significant volume. A strategic emphasis on gift-giving suggests focusing more on Christmas; other offerings may mean a campaign centered around Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or even just the winter season itself.

2. Build your store on a scalable platform

Many online businesses see dramatically increased traffic to their eCommerce site during the holidays. Even those who don’t anticipate a substantial holiday rush are well advised to prepare for one, as there may not be a more important consideration for the holiday season than making sure your site is built on servers that can handle the increased demand.

Depending on the holiday experience you plan to deliver to your customers, this may mean replatforming your current eCommerce site. In other cases, it may mean launching specialty sites dedicated to curated holiday sales. A SaaS-based eCommerce platform that allows multiple storefronts, like Amazon Webstore, can help get a holiday presence online quickly and without requiring significant IT support.

Promotions centered on Black Friday or Cyber Monday—or flash sales held any time of year—require that a site’s eCommerce platform be able to handle a significant traffic spike, as these sales are designed to drive generous site traffic in a short period of time. Long page-load times during big sales and high-traffic seasons almost always mean lost sales; site downtime, due to servers crashing from user demand, may mean that the doors are closed during your best sales time of the year.

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Online shopping on the busiest days of the year was up significantly year-over-year from 2010 to 2011.Data source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-dougherty/2011/12/post_holiday_traffic_boom_1.html

Top Holiday Shopping Days, 2010-2011

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Thanksgiving Black Friday Cyber Monday Christmas Day After Christmas

2010

2011

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+31%+0%+29%+2%+9%

Building your holiday eCommerce offering on a scalable platform like Amazon Webstore can prevent major resource strains over the holidays. Sites built on the Webstore platform are fully hosted on Amazon’s cloud, which has the infrastructure to handle traffic spikes without downtime or increased latencies. Amazon Webstore has enabled sites to host Black Friday sales with traffic loads of up to 150,000 concurrent users and thousands of transactions per second without a noticeable effect to site visitors, and without a significant investment in servers or infrastructure.

The cost of acquiring and operating that level of server infrastructure in-house—especially if it is only in use during the holidays—can be prohibitively expensive.

3. Give your site some holiday spirit

Once the weather starts to get cool, department stores start playing holiday music to get shoppers in the mood to shop for the holidays. While playing music on your eCommerce site would likely be an unpopular move, there are other ways you can get visitors to your site in the holiday frame of mind.

• Strategically organize your products for holiday shopping. Even if your products are organized into categories in a logical way (for example, with “Pants” and “Shirts” in their own categories), consider also adding holiday-specific categories, like “Gifts for Men.” Adding these new categories to your site-wide navigation will make sure they get seen; you may find that a new gift-centric category becomes your most popular during the holidays.

• Answer all of their questions before they ask. Consider making your return policy and the shipping information prominent on the site. Think about the questions your shoppers will have and make it easy for them to find the answers. Removing these cognitive barriers to purchasing could set you apart from a competitor selling similar products.

• Be ready when they DO have questions. If you post a phone number or email address for customer questions, make sure that you have enough manpower dedicated to it during the holiday rush. Customers will need quick answers to their questions—and it’s in your best interest to answer them before they try shopping somewhere else.

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Samsonitebackpacks.com makes its shipping policy prominent at the top of every page.

• Build a little joy into your brand image. While the holidays can be stressful for many people, they’re also “the most wonderful time of the year.” Tapping into this cheerful vibe, in site copy and promotional materials, can brighten your brand and get site visitors in the mood for gift shopping.

4. Get your inventory and shipping ready

Correctly forecasting demand for the holiday season may be a science, but determining the right inventory levels for your business is an art. When surveyed , retail CFOs were divided on whether holding too little inventory (53%) or too much inventory (47%) during the holidays is a greater risk. Both can be costly, and can take the jingle out of an otherwise profitable holiday season.

In addition to getting the right amount of inventory, your business needs to be ready to ship all the orders that come in. This is a customer service endeavor as much as an operations one—perhaps more than any other time of year, your customers need their orders shipped promptly.

Outsourcing your picking, packing, and shipping to a third-party logistics provider like Fulfillment by Amazon can make a tremendous difference during the holidays. Your products are held in and shipped from Amazon fulfillment centers, meaning that your business does not need to ramp up warehousing space or personnel to store and ship your holiday inventory. Fulfillment by Amazon also handles returns, which are a significant consideration during the holiday shipping season.

For your customers’ sake, make the shipping policy and details clear on your site. How long will shipping take, and how much does it cost? Perhaps most importantly, when is the last day they can submit an order, and still be guaranteed to get their item by the holiday?

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Eco-friendly shoe manufacturer Okabashi dresses up its brand each year with holiday messaging.

Having products fulfilled by Amazon also allows eCommerce businesses to offer Amazon Prime FREE Two-Day Shipping to your customers who are Amazon Prime members. Two-day and overnight shipping options allow shoppers to keep buying from your site even when the gift-giving day gets dangerously close—and that means more sales for your business.

Both Fulfillment by Amazon and Amazon Prime plug seamlessly into the Amazon Webstore platform, allowing you to streamline your holiday business with one trusted vendor.

5. Bring customers in with holiday marketing

It doesn’t take long to find out that the holidays are an advertising bonanza; it’s the most difficult time to get your message heard, since your campaign must compete with millions and millions of dollars being spent by advertisers with the same goals. It’s the busiest time in advertising, though, because it’s also the best time to be heard—and every year each advertiser has to decide whether to jump in with both feet or let the holiday shopping season pass them by.

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Amazon Webstore, Amazon Prime, and Fulfillment by Amazon can combine to make your business run smoothly and ensure a good holiday shopping experience for customers.

Themed newsletters from electronics retailer Creative reach existing customers with holiday-specific offers and discounts.

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If the holidays are too important for your business to pass up—and they probably are—consider these tips for your holiday marketing:

• If you go, go all in. The marketplace is so crowded with messaging during the holiday season that a small, traditional ad spend can often have the same impact as not spending anything at all. Closely evaluate your target market and business goals and be willing to spend to reach potential buyers. Try new channels, too; Amazon Product Ads are a compelling new ad unit that integrates with Amazon Webstore and allows you to advertise your products right on Amazon.com—in front of the millions of people coming to Amazon to shop.

• Reach out to your customers first. Existing customers can be up to 80% more likely to purchase from your business than new customers , so it makes perfect sense to reach out to them first. A nicely targeted email campaign can make sure that your most loyal fans are shopping with you again. Social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, are good places to reach them too.

• Generate holiday-centric content. Shoppers go to search engines for holiday shopping, and there is a real opportunity to be visible and drive more sales. Holiday-themed blog posts can do well in searches; timely content like a gift-giving guide can drive traffic on its own. Remember that shoppers are often looking for this kind of helpful content already; it’s just up to you to give it to them.

• Stick to your niche. There’s enough mass-market advertising out there that it’s worth avoiding broad messaging and targeting. The tighter you can focus on your target market, the better; for example, instead of creating a guide of the “best holiday gifts for men”, consider focusing on something as narrow as the “best holiday gifts for fly fishermen.” The search volume for such niche-specific terms may be lower overall, but you can focus on driving better-qualified (and thus higher-converting) traffic instead.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

The holidays only come once a year—which makes it important to be prepared. As shoppers increasingly go online for their holiday shopping, it is likewise increasingly essential to have your site built on a scalable platform, be ready with sufficient inventory, and market your products to the right audience.

Put these tips to work for your business, and it might be happy holidays after all.

Designer brand Karen Millen brings some class and style to holiday marketing.

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1 Mulpuru, Sucharita (2012). US Online Retail Hits $200B. Retrieved 30 July 2012 from Forrester: http://blogs.forrester.com/ archive/201202/1842 DeMarco, Anthony (2012). NRF: 2011 Holiday Sales Up 4.1 Percent. Retrieved 24 August 2012 from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/ sites/anthonydemarco/2012/01/16/nrf-2011-holiday-sales-up-4-1-percent/3 Wohl, Jessica (2012). As school bells ring, retailers start listening for sleigh bells. Retrieved 24 August 2012 from Reuters: http:// in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/20/usa-retail-holiday-idINL2E8JHJYX201208204 Ferrara, Al (2011). CFOs Say Holiday Inventory Levels Steady, but Reflect Cost Increases. Retrieved 23 July 2012 from Consumer Business Compass: https://blog.bdo.com/index.php/2011/10/07/cfos-say-holiday-inventory-levels-steady-but-reflect-cost-increases/5 Jackson, C. F. (2011). Creating Repeat Customers. Retrieved 23 July 2012 from Consumer Business Compass: http://www.slideshare. net/wbd2008/email-marketing-creating-repeat-customers6 Steiner, Ina (2011). Holiday Shopping Trends from ComScore, Google, Amazon and eBay. Retrieved 23 July 2012 from eCommerce Bytes: http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y11/m11/i25/s03/

About Amazon WebstoreAmazon Webstore is a complete commerce platform that enables companies to leverage Amazon technology and expertise in building and managing their direct-to-consumer business.

Commerce sites built on the Amazon Webstore platform utilize Amazon’s powerful cloud infrastructure and payment processing technology to deliver a scalable, secure online shopping experience to customers. Amazon Webstore also integrates seamlessly with selling on the Amazon Marketplace and using Fulfillment by Amazon, Amazon Prime, and other Amazon Services.

To get started with Amazon Webstore, visit the website at http://webstore.amazon.com or contact the Amazon Webstore team directly.