Holiday Planning Tips for Ecommerce Businesses
TL;DR
The holiday season can make-or-break ecommerce brands: Strategic planning and optimization can turn an overwhelming time into a growth opportunity for your brand
Early planning is ideal: Build a promotional calendar around key shopping dates early on and use previous data to predict peak demand. These steps will allow you to create campaigns and offers that will resonate with your audience
Can you handle it? Ensuring that your site can handle an upswing in traffic is imperative around the holidays. Optimize your site’s performance through a few simple checks: Load testing and scalability, site speed testing, and ensuring a smooth mobile performance and a simple checkout process
Plan inventory carefully: Utilize past data to predict inventory demand, prepare for returns, and implement alerts to recover from missed sales
Strategize your holiday marketing campaigns: Align your offers, messages, and channels with data-driven customer behavior, and layer in holiday urgency, gift guides, and teaser campaigns to keep the momentum going
Customer service matters: Set yourself apart through exceptional and meaningful customer service by being clear, supportive, and flexible in your actions before, during, and after purchase
Post-purchase process: Turn holiday shoppers into long-term, loyal customers with specialized post-purchase email updates, loyalty programs, and exclusive offers that customers value
Analyze performance for future planning: Be sure to reflect on the performance of your products, campaigns, and offers to improve your strategy for the next holiday season
The holiday season can often make-or-break ecommerce brands. This is the time when buying intention is highest: Last-minute decisions are being made and customers are looking for gifts, deals, and delight. Unfortunately, it’s also the time when mistakes are magnified: stockouts, slow sites, confusing checkout flows, or poor customer experience can cost you dearly.
To turn this period into a growth opportunity, careful planning is essential. Here are holiday planning tips tailored for ecommerce businesses, so instead of feeling overwhelmed, you feel empowered to optimize.
Start Early + Build a Holiday Calendar
Ecommerce holiday planning should really start in Q3, but for small businesses, this is not always feasible. With that said, waiting until November is too late. To help get you started, use data from past years to map out your sales curve. From there, identify peak dates, such asBlack Friday, Cyber Monday, regional events, and your shipping cutoff days.
As a point of reference, here are the big dates for 2025:
November 11: Single’s Day
November 27: Thanksgiving
November 28: Black Friday*
November 29: Small Business Saturday
December 1: Cyber Monday
December 8: Green Monday
December 21: Super Saturday
December 24: Christmas Eve
December 26: Boxing Day
*Treat “Black Friday” as more than one day as it now often stretches across weeks with early-bird sales, extended offers, and post-holiday promotions.
Once you have a rough timeline of your holiday calendar, you can begin teasing holiday offers and campaigns to determine what resonates best with your audience.
Ensure Site Readiness + Performance
Regardless of how solid your marketing strategy is, the best marketing still fails if your site can’t handle traffic or if the user experience is slow. The following are recommended steps you should take to ensure that your site is ready. Keep in mind the execution of these tasks will vary depending on your site platform.
Load Testing + Scalability: Simulate peak traffic to ensure your infrastructure holds up
Mobile Optimization: With a majority of consumers shopping via mobile, your site must be nimble, responsive, and fast. You can utilize Google Search Console or Google Lighthouse to test these metrics
Optimize Product Pages: Make sure your images are clear and image file sizes are minimal. Leverage product videos (if possible) to increase engagement. Keep your product copy concise, and check for any friction in your add-to-cart flows
Simplify Checkout: Reduce steps, offer guest checkouts, and include multiple payment options (credit cards, digital wallets, BNPL, paypal, etc.)
Monitor and Preempt Errors: Check for broken links, inventory mismatches, unavailable SKUs so you can catch them before they surface to customers
If you don’t have a dev department to support this testing, pull in other team members and even friends/family to test your site!
Ensure Appropriate Inventory
You don’t want to build your holiday promotions around a product you can’t keep in stock, and you don’t want to end the year with an overabundance of products you can’t move. Both of these can hurt your revenue and cash flow. To help alleviate these issues:
Forecast demand using previous years’ trends, seasonality, and market changes, including economic concerns for your target audience
Plan how you will treat returns. The holiday season is notorious for a spike in returns, so be sure to make it easy for the customer but also cost-effective for your business. Consider an extended return window to ensure customer satisfaction
If you can’t avoid a stockout, you can ensure you have back-in-stock alerts and flows established to re-engage customers that might have missed out.
Once you feel good about the logistics of your holiday season, start your promotion strategy.
Holiday-First Marketing & Campaign Strategies
Promotions, campaigns, and messaging need to align precisely with holiday behavior. Start your marketing campaign strategy by referring to your holiday calendar that you already mapped out and consider the following:
Consider how many touchpoints your target audience will interact with throughout their shopping journey. According to Google, 61% of shoppers interact with 5+ touchpoints in their online purchase journey, and Google and YouTube are present in 86% of those journeys. Assess your sales and Google Analytics data to determine where your best customers are coming from
When planning what those touchpoints should be, revisit your top campaigns from prior holiday seasons (or even throughout the year)
What messaging worked?
What offer was most appealing?
What channel converted best?
What failed?
When thinking through your messaging, incorporate urgency language like low stock, limited quantity, and countdowns (“last day to ship in time”) as well as VIP early access and cart recovery
Layer in content and awareness early by creating holiday gift guides, playbooks, and teaser campaigns. This helps position your brand well for search when shoppers begin thinking about gifting
Plan for post-purchase, user-generated content. In your email flows, you can encourage shoppers to share gift unboxings and holiday setups (and ensure they tag your brand). This extends your reach and generates additional interest based on real customer excitement
Measure the effectiveness of your efforts and adjust throughout the season to ensure your campaigns are performing well.
Provide Exceptional Customer Service
During the holiday chaos, customer experience can set you apart, which goes well beyond the current holiday season. Customers will remember how you saved the day… or didn’t. Here are some ideas to help you create a memorable customer experience for your customers:
Pre-Purchase: Clearly state all of your delivery deadlines - prominently and often, including language for last-order-by dates for holiday delivery
Pre-Purchase: Provide proactive customer support via chatbots, live chat, and/or clear FAQs
During Purchase: Offer gift wrapping, message cards, and recipient shipping address options
Post-Purchase: Send timely order, shipping, and delivery confirmations with tracking links and provide updates if anything unexpected occurs
Delivery: Add delight with surprise notes, small bonus gifts, or incentives that build goodwill and loyalty beyond the holidays
Customer Retention Planning + Reflection
Just because the packages have shipped and joy has been delivered certainly doesn’t mean your job is done! Work on developing repeat customers through your post-purchase processes.
Set up solid flows for the following touchpoints:
Order Confirmation
Shipping Confirmation
Delivery Update
Post-delivery Check-In
Outside of the order flow, you should nurture your customers throughout the year:
Onboard them into your loyalty program
Cross-sell and bundles suggestions
Special offers for returning customers
Back-in-stock alerts
New products and clearance events
When the dust has fully settled on the season, analyze performance:
Which products, channels, campaigns, customer segments outperformed?
Which underperformed?
Use these insights to get a headstart on next year’s plan.
Final Thoughts
For ecommerce businesses, the holiday season certainly has the potential for high rewards and customer loyalty. However, we know this doesn’t happen by chance. Brands that plan ahead, optimize their website experience, align inventory with demand, create thoughtful marketing campaigns, and prioritize customer experience are the ones who “make it” during the holiday season. By approaching the holidays with a clear strategy, you can make the most of the season while also creating a loyal customer base and carrying your momentum into the new year.