Holiday sales season is just around the corner. Whether your focus is on Thanksgiving (25th Nov), Black Friday (26th Nov) and the whole Black Week, Cyber Monday (29th Nov), Christmas (25th Dec), New Years (1st Jan) or any other seasonal sale, we want to take some time to remind and reassure our customers of:

What we will be taking care of automatically
Extra things you can ask for from us
A handy list of things we’d recommend considering that you do for yourself

Ecommerce will account for a record 18.9% of total holiday season retail sales.
eMarketer

We know how important this time of year can be for ecommerce businesses. Let’s get this right, together!

What we take care of in the background

For all customers with a hosting and management plan, we will be:

Maintaining WordPress, WooCommerce & plugins
Running regular backups
Hardening security
Optimising performance (within your current plan)
Proactively monitoring and responding to infrastructure loads
Renewing SSL certificates

For all customers with retained or ad-hoc support arrangements, we will of course also be on call to respond to your service requests.

Extras we can do for you!

You may already be enjoying some of these benefits as an Angry Creative client. If there’s anything you’d like to add, please let us know!

Check your DNS configuration – as the recent Facebook outage shows, no one is immune to DNS issues! But if you want to minimise any accidental DNS issues, you can ask us to manage your DNS.
Leverage a CDN – Content Delivery Networks are a key part of modern website performance infrastructure. As Cloudflare partners, Angry Creative can help you get the most out of a CDN.
Review your hosting plan with us – all hosting plans come with limits. If you’re hoping for a great holiday sales season, we’d definitely recommend getting in touch to talk to us about your marketing plans. For any business running holiday sales we recommend moving to at least our 1500 SEK / 150 pound plan which comes with both higher limits and increased performance features.
Leverage some of the latest and greatest Angry Creative solutions (all of which are available through Qala):
- Qala Stock Sync – make sure you don’t over- (or under-) sell your stock if you have a multisite WooCommerce store by using the only WooCommerce stock syncing plugin designed for intense scale.
- Qala Elastic Enterprise Search – supercharge your site search to transform product and content discovery on your site into enterprise-quality.
- Qala Elastic Enterprise Filter – building on Enterprise Search, this plugin gives you an incredibly snappy and accurate way to let prospects browse your store and discover your products.
- Qala Minicart – removes the need for a separate cart page, increasing conversion rates.
- Qala Global Cart – ensures that customers switching locales on your internationalised WooCommerce store maintain their cart contents.
- Qala Product Connect – creates connections between products in your internationalised WooCommerce store, improving international SEO and enabling the Global Cart.
- Qala Defer – allows us to quickly and cost-effectively tweak your site’s loading characteristics to boost Google Core Web Vitals scores.
- Qala imgproxy – a very powerful and time-saving infrastructure-level feature that is a panacea for all image optimisations on your site. Your store management team probably has enough to do on the run up to sales, so using this feature will give them a ton of time back whilst still ensuring your site images are as optimised as they can be. This solution is only available on higher hosting tiers.
Offer “Back in Stock” Alerts – we’ve got a solution that’s battle-tested and ready to go. If your holiday sales see your most popular products sell out, this feature will allow you to capture some of that excess demand as soon as you can restock.

Like the sound of some of these new features?

Things you can do yourself

Here’s a list of what clients tell us they typically work on as the holiday sales season approaches.

Plan your sales timings and campaigns – then tell us about them!
Plan any new site design and mechanics you need – again, if you think you’ll need any site updates, please do let us know asap as we’re under 2 months away now.
Create content, landing pages and get your ad campaigns ready to go.
Ensure your analytics are set up correctly – so you can monitor and adapt as the sales proceed.
Check your site’s metrics and KPIs:
- Traffic by source
- Site speed (via Google Core Web Vitals – especially on mobile)
- Key ecommerce metrics such as:
  - Average Order Value (AOV)
  - Click Through Rate (CTR)
  - Conversion Rate
  - Cart Abandonment Rate
  - Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
  - Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  - Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Brief your customer services team so that they’re ready to support all your campaigns and customer queries
Review your policies (especially for refunds and returns)
Review cross and up sell settings
Consider setting up gift cards or promo codes
Test, test, test!
Make sure your site(s) are correctly configured for the recent Brexit/IOSS changes

Is there anything we should add to this list? Let us know!

In conclusion

There’s a lot to do! We hope that you’ll have a very successful holiday sales season. Please do let us know if you think we missed anything off this list. Remember to talk to us about your plans (our experienced Customer Success team is always happy to advise!). If you’re not already an Angry Creative customer but are looking for a bullet-proof partner to support your holiday sales season, of course we’d love to hear from you but be quick, time is running out this year…