Winning the Holiday Rush: A Checklist for Ecommerce Businesses

Cyber Week is the most significant shopping week of the year, with Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday all within five days. 2022 calculations report that U.S. ecommerce sales totaled $35.3 billion from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday — this is a 4% increase from $33.9 billion in 2021. U.S. consumers spent $11.3 billion online on Cyber Monday this year alone.

With mobile devices accounting for 51% of online sales, modern consumers expect a shopping experience that’s easy, fast, and convenient. To meet demand and customer expectations, retail and ecommerce companies need to quickly process and fulfill a high volume of orders during these substantial sales spikes.

Challenges can arise when ecommerce businesses utilize multiple applications for critical processes like order fulfillment, inventory management, product updates, finances, returns, customer communications, and more. Many systems are often disconnected, requiring manual effort between departments and data silos.

Preparing your ecommerce business for the holiday season

To succeed during Cyber Week and prepare for the upcoming holiday season, ecommerce and retailer businesses need to minimize manual procedures, enable real-time data integration, and automate key business processes.

As you prepare your business for the peak selling season, here are several questions you should ask about your systems:

• Evaluate your manual efforts: Do you spend 10 hours or more per week manually moving data between systems?
• Order-to-fulfillment: Are customers satisfied with how quickly their online orders are being fulfilled?
• Inventory levels: Is product availability accurately reflected across all your sales channels all of the time?
• Product catalogs: Are shoppers viewing up-to-date product information across all channels? Is your pricing and product information reliably up-to-date everywhere?
• Customer communications: Are customers happy with status notifications and insights on their orders or returns?

Is your ecommerce business equipped to handle the holiday rush?

Asking yourself these questions can help you determine if your system can handle the pressure of the holiday rush. Your strategic plan must ensure that every application in your ecommerce supply chain can seamlessly share accurate data and that your business processes are automated end-to-end.

In 2022, the number of orders synced through the Celigo Platform from Friday, November 25, through Monday, November 28, more than doubled that of the weekend before. Despite this increase, our platform handled the increased load flawlessly; we have had 100% uptime since January 2022.

Thousands of ecommerce businesses rely on the Celigo Platform to enable smoother, more efficient operations while using fewer technical resources. Based on customer data, Celigo has experienced zero downtime through the 2022 Cyber Week.