10 Simple Ways to Prep Your eCommerce Shop for the Holidays

If you’re looking to make sure that your site and store are all prepped and ready for online sales this holiday shopping season, you’re in the right place! Even though I personally tend to prefer a strategic product drop or flash sale that doesn’t depend on seasonality, it never hurts to make sure that your site is in tip-top shape. The 10 simple things on this list will help you make sure that you’re ready for the influx of orders and inquiries that come with running an eCommerce business this time of year! 

1. Make sure you’re using Squarespace to track your inventory.

And that your inventory counts are accurate and up to date! Correct inventory counts can help you know what you need to order more of, what you should discount or put on sale, prevent overselling, and create a sense of urgency to buyers. If you sell on multiple platforms or need to sync inventory into Quickbooks for accounting purposes, try Trunk (review in this post) which keeps everything synced up automatically!

2. Customize your store’s notification & cart abandonment emails.

While this is something you want to do anyways, making sure that your emails are personalized is a great tip around holiday time. Including special information about shipping timelines or return policies can help reduce the number of customer service inquiries you receive so that you and your team can focus on fulfillment instead. Personalizing your shop’s emails can also help you build a sense of community around your brand, helping boost loyalty and repeat business. And don’t forget about your cart abandonment email! Updating it so it feels relevant to the season can make it stand out and provide a gentle little nudge to come back to your site and complete their purchase. For more on customizing your Squarespace eCommerce emails, click here!

3. Connect a shipping extension to your site to make fulfillment easier.

I mean, unless waiting in line at the post office on Christmas Eve is your thing I guess? 🤷‍♀️ A shipping extension is basically the friendly little office assistant you never knew you always needed. The right one will select the best courier, generate labels for you and automatically update Squarespace to mark the order as fulfilled with the tracking number. You can check out this post for a review of all the available shipping extension options on Squarespace but my fave by far is Easyship.

Bonus: sign up for a new account using code GWZMUM and get a $20 account credit. Thanks, Easyship!

4. Offer FREE shipping.

The reason behind this is simple: shipping fees kill conversions. Even if you don’t want to include free shipping as part of your strategy year-round, adding a free shipping tier will help you be more competitive during the holiday shopping season. You don’t have to give it all away, though! Use an automatic discount to limit free shipping on only orders over a certain amount. This will help boost conversions AND increase average cart value! (For more on this topic, check out How to Set Up a Profitable Shipping Strategy on Squarespace.) 

5. Set up local pick-up.

If recent years have taught us anything it’s that the number of people shopping online for the holidays has totally inundated carriers like UPS, FedEx, and USPS. To prevent shipping delays causing major holiday disappointment, offer your local customers the option to pick up their online orders in person. This means they can shop right up until the last minute (something they can’t do from other online retailers who’ve had to cut off shipping for the season) and could also lead to some last-minute in-person buys. Win-win! For more on exactly how to set this up, check out this post.

6. Update your FAQ page.

I love a great FAQ page. Done right, it can help your customers find instant answers to their questions and reduce customer service inquiries about basic or routine things, freeing you up to focus on more important issues. Setting up an FAQ page on Squarespace is easy (here are some tips on how to do it!) but the most important thing is obviously the content. Anticipate the needs of your customers and make it easy for them to have everything they need to feel comfortable shopping with you. 

7. Add an announcement bar to highlight shipping & promo info.

Among all the built-in features to help you sell on Squarespace, I really love using an announcement bar around holiday time to keep people up to date on shipping cutoffs, promos, or any other relevant information that might motivate them to buy. If you have a lot of info, don’t try to cram it all into your announcement bar. Instead, use that real estate to link out to your FAQ page or a landing page dedicated to holiday info.

8. Offer gift cards.

Of all the things you can sell on Squarespace, gift cards are probably the easiest to set up and make perfect sense for the holidays! While I usually move gift cards to the bottom of the heap in larger stores, during the holidays I would actually do the opposite and move them right to the top! You can even feature them in a pop-up or in a prominent place on your homepage to make them a convenient option for people looking to give an easy gift.

9. Be smart about your discounts & sales.

Even though the holiday season can feel like a total frenzy doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take the time to be methodical in what you put on sale or what discounts and promos you plan on running. All of this is a long way of saying don’t just go marking things down or making up offers willy nilly. Start by making sure you understand how discounts work on Squarespace and then make sure to check your Squarespace commerce analytics panel. 

10. Hit up your mailing list!

You’ve put in all this hard work and now it’s time to tell everyone all about it! Stats always say that it costs way less to sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new one and there’s no time like the holidays to take care of your VIPs! If you’ve been using customer profiles to track your customers and their activity throughout the year, it’s easy to add frequent customers or big spenders to a special segment of your email list. Send them things like special offers or advanced notice of sales via Squarespace Email Campaigns -- everyone loves feeling like they’re in the insider’s club!