The year-end holiday season is no small event. We all know it’s one of the busiest seasons of the year for almost everyone: preparing for large meals, shopping for friends and family, decorating, and countless events. If you’re a business owner, getting ready for the holidays isn’t just about buying and wrapping presents. It’s about getting your business, online or brick and mortar, ready for holiday shopping. You might be wondering:

• Is it worth the time and effort to prepare my eCommerce store for the holiday season?
• What do I need to do to make sure my eCommerce business is ready for holiday shoppers?

Let’s take a look at each question and explore some ideas and resources for making sure you’re prepared.

What is SCA?

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)* is a regulation that took effect on September 14, 2019 that requires merchants to use multiple methods of verifying a customer’s identity. To comply with new requirements and make sure your sales don’t take an unnecessary hit, you need to lay the groundwork.

Merchants accepting online payments need to use two independent authentication methods to verify that a customer is who they say they are.

According to a 2018 US Bank study, bad cash flow management and a poor understanding of accounting and finance are the leading roadblocks to business success.

Feel like you may be part of this statistic? This article aims to expand your knowledge by providing actionable solutions to understand, track, and manage your business accounting – without taking more time out of your day.

WooCommerce provides business owners with a fantastic platform to sell their products, and its customizability allows you to support and automate your business processes like no other. One of the most important of these processes is accounting.

Expanding into new markets brings great opportunities and sometimes unexpected challenges. Here are some areas to research before deciding the next steps for your business.

Though the world has become more interconnected thanks to the internet, air travel, and other technological advancements, there are still many local cultural, economic, and geographic differences. And while tapping into new markets is important for growing your business, doing it the wrong way can be disastrous. 

There are five key considerations for successfully going global: language, infrastructure, payments, legal requirements, and cultural norms.

In all the productivity and preparation for the holiday season, some important elements of your business can be overlooked. Over in WooCommerce.com Happiness, we identified four focal areas — two physical, two technical — that can sometimes cause a few bumps in the road, and put a checklist together to keep you covered.

So, here are the four areas to watch over in order to keep your store running smoothly this holiday season.

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Lots of posts about eCommerce over the holidays encourage you to get started early. We’ve published a number of these ourselves!

But the good news is it’s never too late to set up a sale, discount, or deal in your store. As long as the holidays are still happening, you can take a few minutes to get in on the holiday action.

Try these last-minute holiday sale ideas now, next month, or the next time a holiday rolls around.

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Once the holidays are over, you can breathe a long sigh of relief. Things can finally settle down and go back to normal, right?

Well… not exactly. With projected record-setting holiday sales come record-breaking returns in January and February. This past year, UPS alone expected to process 6 million returns in the week after Christmas.

After the holidays end, your top priority needs to be satisfying the customers who have ill-fitting, unsuitable, or defective merchandise that they’d like to send back to you. An estimated 25 to 30 percent of online purchases are sent back! This means you have to have a plan to handle post-holiday returns — and handle them so well that these gift recipients turn into bonafide customers.

Let’s take a look at how you can handle these returns and exchanges smoothly. We’ll start with what you can do now, before the season starts, to get your website ready. Then we’ll look at how to properly handle returns and unhappy giftees.

Ready? Let’s get a move on.

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Retailers acquire between 29% and 59% more customers during the holiday period, making the season make-or-break for you or your client’s year.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is this: can your site handle the increase in traffic? As an on-demand WooExpert, we have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, when it comes to optimized sites, and we want to help you avoid the latter two.

There is no simple cure-all solution, but we’ve assembled a list of 6 proactive improvements you can make to your store right now. The more people that hit your site, the more noticeable the effect of these optimizations will be.

Let’s get started.

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When it comes to online shopping, the holiday season reigns supreme. Between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and general Christmas shopping, more people are going online to buy gifts for their friends and family. In fact, last holiday season, online shopping generated a record-setting $108.2 billion in revenue—almost a 15% increase from the 2016 holiday season.

Due to the overwhelming popularity of online shopping, you’d think running an eCommerce site was pretty easy, right? After all, nobody wants to deal with crowded malls and holiday traffic when they can order from the comfort of their own home.

But as the store owner, your job extends beyond helping the customer during their shopping journey. A large portion of your work should be spent not just attracting new customers, but also creating marketing and engagement campaigns that strengthen relationships with existing ones. And one of the best ways to boost retention rates is through post-purchase email marketing.

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If you run an online store, shipping is the one area where everything you do becomes tangible to your customer. At no time is this more critical to a positive customer experience than the holidays, when the product your customer is touching is likely to be a gift from a friend or family member.

But there are obstacles. If you don’t prepare, you can ruin someone’s holiday with a late or damaged shipment. Holidays offer opportunities to build your brand, increase customer loyalty, and acquire new customers…but they also offer benefits that will improve your bottom line.

The best way to ensure your business’s success is to learn how to prepare for some of the most common holiday shipping issues. In this post, we’ll cover how you can get ready for everything from lost shipments to weather delays to the general rush caused by an increase in packages.

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Customer service during the holidays is both an immense challenge and a huge opportunity. Retailers who deliver consistent, high quality service to their holiday customers can turn once-off purchasers into loyal return customers.

Here’s how to set your team up for holiday support success.

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The holiday shopping season is a busy time for consumers, with a lot of eyeballs staring at computers and phones, researching gifts, and looking for the best deals online.

Even with increased competition and decreased organic reach, social media is still key for getting the attention of your potential customers. But, without a solid plan, success may pass your company by.

Here are eight steps for planning a holiday campaign across your social media channels, so that by the time the holidays arrive you can kick your feet back and enjoy a little more time with family.

Get ready to flex your creative genius!

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The sound that notifies that a customer has placed an order at your online store, is the sound that every store owner wishes to hear more and more. And with the holiday season already in, this is nonetheless most profitable (and busiest) quarter of the year for everyone who dabbles in online retail and eCommerce.

Be it the store owners or marketers dabbling in eCommerce, the preparations for holiday season begins early. Right from stocking the inventory to updating the products in store to setting lucrative offers to lure newcomers; and appreciating existing customers to making sure they are reaching out to the correct audience. This is done almost a month early to accommodate the huge inflow of visitors and shoppers.

With email marketing boasting of 81% customer acquisition capability compared to other marketing channels, it is undeniably the best way to harness this holiday season – to reach your audience while taking care to boost your overall ROI. Yet holiday email marketing is altogether a different ball game compared to email marketing rest of the year.

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Subscriptions can be a fantastic gift option, and with the new WooCommerce Subscriptions Gifting a customer can easily share their love for your store with their friends and family this holiday season.

My parents are both in their eighties and are notoriously hard to buy presents for. Giving them anything remotely technological results in a Christmas Day filled with exclamations of ‘How do you turn it on again?’ or ‘What! What! It’s broken!’ So most years Mum just gets her normal gardening gear and Dad gets a bottle of gin; they each have their own interests 😉

However, one year I won the ‘best gift’ award.

Historic houses are my parents’ one joint love. While my budget is yet to stretch to buying them the real Downton Abbey, a monthly subscription to the organization that runs sites of interest in the UK, the National Trust, was within reach. So my parents could go any time and visit as many places as they wished. They loved it.

I felt pretty smug with my inspired gift idea back then, but now a subscription is a unique gift that any online store can provide – for any person, of any age.

It is a great way to stand out in the busy holiday market and give customers a chance to give something a little bit special. Also, the investment you made in getting your customers to go to your store for their holiday shopping pays dividends throughout the year. You have the chance to create the on-going relationship a subscription gets, so both you, the customer and the recipient continue to benefit, long after the heartburn from holiday overindulgence has faded. A subscription may not necessarily be for life – but it is not just for a moment either!

So WooCommerce Subscriptions allows you to create a holiday gift that lasts all year, and with WooCommerce Subscriptions Gifting it’s now possible for one person to buy a subscription product for somebody else.

Customers can choose to purchase subscriptions for others by entering the recipient’s email on the product page, cart, or checkout.

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There are plenty of things you can do to bump up your earning potential, but quite a few of them involve adding new products or bringing in more inventory. What we’re going to look at today will allow you to earn more with simple “packaging” changes to the products you already have.

Let’s dive into how you can set up and promote product bundles this holiday season, and a few ways that you can ensure they help you make more money.

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If you’re considering running a promotion over the holidays, have you stopped to work out if you can actually afford it?

It’s the right question to ask upfront because not every online store operates with profit margins that allow for discounts (let alone deep ones of 50% or more). Plus: setting up and running a promotion takes time, which is something new store owners don’t have in handfuls.

The good news is you don’t have to offer a discount to stand out during the holidays. You could do something as simple as offering free shipping or as little as a few dollars off (if certain order criteria are met).

We’ve picked four of tried and tested alternatives to deep discounts for sprucing up the holidays.

Before we dive in: let’s explore the question of whether you can afford to offer a discount in the first place.

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