Beat the Holiday Rush

Graham Leckie, VP OperationsDemac Media

Preparing your eCommerce Store for the busiest time of the year

Overview

• What the Holidays Mean• Code Freeze and System Infrastructure• Inventory and Fulfillment• Marketing Campaigns• Sales and Merchandising • Staff and Customer Awareness• Planning ahead - 2015

DID YOU KNOW?THERE ARE ONLY

140 DAYSUNTIL CHRISTMAS?!

What constitutes the “Holidays?”

What the Holidays Mean

• Black Friday• Cyber Monday• Christmas• Boxing Day

Code Freeze and System Infrastructure

Code Freeze and System Infrastructure

• Make sure to have all development and testing completed by mid-October

• Table any new development ideas for execution during the season for implementation on staging

• Risk Mitigation – know what to do if the site goes down

• Stress Testing ahead of time

Inventory and Fulfillment

Inventory and Fulfillment

• Make sure that correct counts are in place to limit customer service issues

• Should already have buying complete• Separate eCommerce inventory• Ability to pull from warehouse or store levels

Marketing Campaigns

Marketing Campaigns

• Email– Do not send a blast to the whole list at once– Test all links before going out from an external environment

if possible– NEVER use a search string!– Cached pages– Tell a story, not just the sale (higher value items)– Mobile Friendly

• SEM– Preplan adwords– Text vs Display with Social

Sales & Merchandising

Sales and Merchandising

• Make sure that all content is in place before the 11th hour

• Index/Cache Completed• Cross-sell/up-sell for loss leaders – attach!• Drive traffic as well from social media• Specific holiday categories• Rich descriptions and content to differentiate

Staff Awareness

Staff and Customer Awareness

• Make sure that they know what the holidays mean – especially for new employees

• Incentives for extra hours – pizza, liquid refreshers, coffee– Saves from them having to go offsite

• Customer service is key, know how to make a customer happy– Replacement for ‘hot’ items that go out of stock– They are stressed as well!– Shipping and Returns

• SMILE!

2015 and beyond….

Planning Ahead - 2015

• What to do to fill in the valley• Incentives for return shoppers in the new year• Gift Cards• Deploy what was in development over the

holidays– New Features/Functionality– Code Audit/Clean up

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Questions?

Graham Leckie, VP OperationsDemac Media