Set your online store up for success this holiday season with our free downloadable workbook.
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The holiday shopping season between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day is traditionally the busiest of the year for brick-and-mortar retailers in the U.S., and it’s no different for ecommerce sales. By optimizing your online store and creating a marketing strategy, you can enjoy sales growth and come out of the season with a better sense of what works for your business.
While the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, marks the official start to the holiday shopping season, the entire fourth quarter is one of the biggest times of year for sales. Many people start shopping for holiday gifts in October, before Halloween, as they scramble to get gifts for the holidays, and gifting extends into February for Valentine’s Day.
Get ahead of the holiday rush by following these holiday tips.
1. Get your online store ready for holiday shoppers
The first step to prepare for the holiday rush is to get the products you plan to sell uploaded to your online store as soon as possible. If this is your first time setting up your shop, starting an ecommerce store can be done in a handful of steps. Use a customizable template to get a professional site up quickly—it takes just a few moments to upload your products.
If you already have a store on a marketplace platform, add those products to your website so that everything is in one place. You can import your products from certain marketplaces and sell them directly from your own site. That makes it easier for potential customers to find everything you sell while they’re doing their holiday browsing, no matter what shopping platform they started from.
Make sure to set up integrations with third-party sites that will help customers discover your products. Sync your products with Meta to start selling on Facebook and Instagram and set up the Google Shopping integration so that your products appear in the Google Shopping tab, Image search, and YouTube.
Add seasonal products to your store
Think about adding popular holiday gifts to your store for the season, like gift cards. Gift cards are easy to customize based on your customer’s budget and for you to send digitally. Plus, they give the recipient the option to choose the gift that they most want or need.
Or get creative with your gift options. If you have a product that people use a lot and frequently reorder, you can set up a subscription that can be sent as a gift, like a “Coffee of the Month” club.
Even if you’re not selling physical products, you can offer other types of creative gift options to your customers. Set up a paywalled Member Site where people can access exclusive content. Then, make it possible to send access as gifts to friends and family.
If you offer services, integrate with Acuity Scheduling to sell gift certificates. Gift recipients can use them to book appointment packages of live classes or services, such as tarot readings or manicures.
Make it easy to find your products
To help new customers discover what you sell, use search engine optimization (SEO). The built-in SEO tools on Squarespace automatically handle indexing, so everything you have on your site can be discovered in a search result.
Keep in mind that it takes search engines time to index a site. Start your site and add new products and features as early as possible so your pages are searchable before the holiday sales season is in full swing. Make sure your site is easy to use on a mobile device, too.
Then, you can assess performance and optimize your store to rank higher in search results when the online shopping rush starts.
See more ways to prepare your site for the holiday season
2. Simplify selling and collecting taxes on your store
The next step to preparing for the holiday sales rush is to set up a checkout page that's easy to find and use. Play around with designs until you find something that fits your brand’s aesthetic.
From there, you can connect with payment processors and installment services that let customers pay off purchases over time. That’ll make it easier for customers to finish checkout, even as their holiday spending grows.
You can also connect your store to services that automatically calculate state sales tax by location and keep track of how much tax you’ve collected. When the holidays are over, TaxJar can help you automate your filing for each state where you owe sales tax.
Choose shipping and pickup options
You have a lot of shipping providers to choose from to get your products in people’s hands. If you aren’t sure which option is best for you, browse Squarespace shipping extensions for services that compare rates from carriers for any order you receive. You can also streamline your workflow and save on USPS shipping options by using our fully integrated shipping labels.
If you’re selling in person, consider offering a local pickup option for customers who would like to get their items instead of ship them. If you’re selling online and in person, you can set up fulfillment profiles to specify which items are pickup only or delivery only and keep your inventory in sync.
Squarespace sellers can also create fulfillment profiles to set shipping rules for individual items, streamlining your workflow and avoiding customer confusion. For example, you can set a specific item as in-person pickup only, or set flat rate shipping and country availability for other items.
To make certain people can find your real-world store, use the Location Management feature, which will ensure the correct street address, contact information, and operating hours show up when customers search for your store’s location online.
Get tips on how to optimize selling, shipping, and fulfillment
3. Create a holiday marketing strategy
Update your online store to add any holiday-specific marketing, like sales or limited-time products. If this isn’t your first holiday season, think about marketing pushes that worked (or didn’t) last year, and how you can change your strategy this year.
Email marketing
Promotional emails are one of the most important tools a business owner has, and Squarespace allows you to collect those addresses and roll them into a mailing list that automatically syncs with Squarespace Email Campaigns. If you haven’t set it up already, add a Newsletter Block to your website to collect email addresses. This can make the difference between serving a one-time buyer and earning a repeat customer.
Create professional-looking emails for your current and potential customers using existing content from your blog or by writing new messaging for the holidays. Campaigns has holiday-themed templates pre-built for you to customize, including a set designed to build anticipation for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
Once you decide on the right look for your marketing email, you can pull the products you want to feature from your store into your email blast. This process will automatically transfer over the product image and description, as well as a link to the product listing on your store. You can also include any discount codes that you want to create in order to incentivize your customers to return to your site.
Use automated emails to boost your sales
On- and off-site promotion
If you have a seasonal offer, make sure to share it both on and off your site. Consider adding a new banner image or a promotional pop-up to announce discounts and new products on your home page. Use these to share any holiday-specific deals you have, such as free shipping or a bonus gift with purchase.
You can also advertise your latest products or seasonal deals on social media. Add your own photos or imagery to your posts or, try creating a video. If you sync your store to your account, your followers can shop from your profile.
Make sure to update discounts and promote them during major retail sales holidays, like during Black Friday sales or on Cyber Monday. You can easily get images for promos in the Squarespace iOS app. Designs are made based on your branding and products, so you don’t have to spend time creating images yourself.
Website features
Some website tools can also help you turn browsing shoppers into customers. Turn on the abandoned cart recovery feature so that customers automatically get reminder emails if they put an item in their cart but didn’t complete the purchase within 24 hours. Or, add a limited availability label when your stock is low to add a sense of urgency for browsers.
Finally, leave customers with a positive impression by offering the option to gift wrap their purchases at checkout, either for a fee or free with a purchase.
Get more tips for your holiday marketing strategy
4. Build a strategy for rewarding customer loyalty
Making a great impression counts when it comes to building loyalty to your store.
One of the best ways to build year-round customer loyalty is to make sure that your return policy is clear and works smoothly. This way, a customer can still have a great experience with your store even if they aren’t satisfied with their purchase. You can choose to offer a full refund or a refund of the full purchase price minus shipping and taxes. These refunds go back to the customer’s credit card or you can offer store credit.
When dealing with customers who need to return an item, remember to be warm and empathetic. If you make the return process easy, they’ll feel more comfortable buying from your store in the future because they know you'll take care of them.
In addition to a post-holiday rise in returns, you may see lower sales in January. If you have leftover inventory to move, send a discount code to your mailing list. This will have the bonus effect of reminding customers of the great experience they had at your store and catching them after major holiday sales are over.
Read more about building year-round customer loyalty
5. Analyze your holiday sales performance
There are a few analytics tools that you can use to find out which of your pages get the most views, where your visitors come from geographically, and which pages or products are more popular.
Use this information to make decisions about which products to invest in going forward. For the most popular products, ask yourself whether you spent more time working on the product listing or polishing the product images, and whether you promoted them more through email or social media. Keep track of the marketing tactics you used to find out which part of your strategy was the most effective.
For a deeper dive into what worked and what didn’t for your store during the holiday season, visit the purchase funnel panel in the Analytics section of your Squarespace account dashboard. This panel breaks down the journey of a sale into a four-step process.
Visited website
Viewed product
Added to cart or started checkout
Purchase complete
This way, you can see where interest seems to be turning into sales most often and where people tend to drop off. This can give you a sense of which products you should continue to invest in and which products you might need to rethink.
Learn how to measure your holiday season sales
This post was updated on September 15, 2023.