It's Christmas Time

If you are thinking it's too early to talk about holiday shoppers, then this article is just in time if not a bit late. Many people gauge when to step up holiday-time marketing, staff, or offers by when they normally shop, which is often in mid-to-late November if not well into December. Last year, we had a new client who wanted the e-commerce site launched in time for Christmas, which meant a target date of Thanksgiving; we were a few days late in getting it ready, so it launched around 29 November. To us, this is around 2 months too late for Christmas shoppers.

Even talking about this now is too late according to a magazine article I just read. In "Fulfilling The Promise," page 30 (if you read paper) of this issue of Internet Retailer, it is suggested that you get your holiday plan in place by June or July and implemented in August or September to make sure you are ready for the activities of the last quarter. This article is talking mostly about fulfillment, which has been a hot topic since the recent debacles with companies like Toys 'R Us not being able to ship all of the orders they got, and disappointing people so late in the game. If you are in a business where you have fulfillment and shipping of orders, you need to make sure your staff, your warehouse, and their staff are ready for more than the volume of business you expect. And you need to make sure of that now, not around Thanksgiving, so that any wackiness can be corrected before it hurts your business.

It's also about your servers or hosting company. Run tests and ask questions to make sure that if visits to your site spike in Q4 that you're not going to get cut off or slowed down. When my company used to do the Miss America website, we always connected with our server company at least a month in advance and then a week or so before to make sure they were going to closely monitor traffic during Pageant Week. We didn't want anyone's experience suffering because of poor preparation. But with all that we tried to prepare for, there was a surprise we got our very first year of live Pageant Week work. Our server company, who will remain nameless for the obvious reason, decided that to prepare the Miss America site for all that traffic, they would move the site to another of their servers. They didn't tell us that, and just moved it the morning of the Pageant. So for a few reasons, mostly the fact that we never got to test the site on the new server before it was just live and out there, none of our cgi scripts ran. This meant no feedback forms and no orders from the "mall." The server company tried to blame it on us saying that we hadn't told them what was on the site, which I'm not going to bother addressing here since it's a bad excuse and well in the past.

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