The end-of-year holiday season is typically a time of surging sales for retailers and e-commerce businesses.
The modern consumer has more choices than ever when it comes to ticking off their holiday shopping lists and most of them never even have to leave the house!
The weeks between Black Friday and Christmas are the defining period of the year for many retailers, making it one of the most aggressively competitive times for e-commerce brands.
The following five tips will help your online business prepare the best strategy for the upcoming peak season:
Inventory Management
The goal here is to meet the rising demand while maintaining operational efficiency.
The way to do that is by being adequately prepared. Preparation is what will stop the mad scrambling when reacting to a seasonal increase in sales.
Start planning well in advance to manage your inventory effectively. Leverage technology by using predictive analytics to forecast demand. Analyse past sales data and implement automated inventory rules that trigger reorders without the need for manual intervention.
Website Performance
If your shoppers encounter slow load times or downtime on your website, they might take their business elsewhere.
To keep your website performance working optimally, you should stress-test servers to ensure they can handle high traffic volumes.
Carry out performance and security tests frequently and use the results to adapt infrastructure capabilities to help manage the demands of the upcoming peak season.
Order Fulfillment
In the digital world where big brands like Amazon set the bar high, your business must implement strategies to keep up during the busiest periods.
If you want to impress your customers, build brand loyalty, and boost sales during the holidays, you should outsource your e-commerce order fulfillment as your business grows.
The right order fulfillment process will comprehensively cover every crucial step from the moment a customer checks out to when they receive (and possibly return) their order.
Every stage plays an essential role in your customer’s overall experience, particularly during peak periods.
Understand Seasonal Trends
The first step to understanding seasonal fluctuations is to understand your sales patterns.
Take a deep dive into your business’s historical data, including sales, customer behavior, and performing online posts. Your ERP system or tools like Sage or QuickBooks can help you uncover valuable trends and pinpoint the start and end of your peak demand periods.
Use that data and couple it with industry trends and external factors, such as weather patterns. For example, beverage businesses could roll out spiced teas to sell during cold winters.
Create a seasonal calendar and mark your busiest and slowest periods, and add in important info on local events and holidays.
Technology
One of the first things online business owners realize as soon as they enter their peak sales season is that business processes and systems quickly become inefficient.
There are often hundreds of small, repetitive tasks involved in managing customers and fulfilling orders, and most of them can be automated.
Embrace technology and implement e-commerce automation to free up time and convert the manual, repetitive tasks into automated ones.
To End
Successfully navigating a busy peak period doesn’t have to be complicated for e-commerce businesses. Follow these five helpful tips above to ensure your online business is operating optimally during the upcoming holiday season.
