The 2021 festive sales season is just around the corner. Whether you’re focusing on Black Friday (26 Nov) and all of Black Week, Cyber Monday (29 Nov), Christmas (24 Dec), New Year (1 January 2022) or any other seasonal sales, we’d like to take this opportunity to remind and reassure our customers:

1. What we will take care of automatically
2. Extra things you can request from us
3. A handy list of things we recommend when you handle things yourself

E-commerce will account for a record 18.9% of total retail sales during the festive season.

eMarketer

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

What we take care of in the background

For all clients with a hosting and management agreement, we will:

• Maintain WordPress, WooCommerce and extensions
• Create regular backups
• Ensure security
• Optimise performance (within your current agreement)
• Proactively monitor and manage infrastructure loads
• Manage SSL certificates

For all customers with ongoing or monthly contracts, we will of course also be on call to respond to your service requests.

Other things we can do for you

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

• Checking your DNS configuration – as we saw with the recent Facebook outage, no one is immune to DNS issues. But if you want to minimise accidental DNS issues, we can help manage your DNS.
• Benefit from a CDN – Content Delivery Networks are an essential part of modern website performance infrastructure, and as a Cloudflare partner, Angry Creative can help you get the most out of a CDN.
• Review your hosting agreement with us – all hosting agreements have limits. If you’re hoping for a great festive season, we definitely recommend getting in touch to talk to us about your marketing plans. For any business running holiday sales, we recommend switching to at least our $1500 plan which has both higher limits and increased performance features.
• Take advantage of some of the latest and greatest solutions from Angry Creative (all available through Qala):
  • Qala Stock Sync – make sure you don’t sell more (or less) than your inventory contains if you have a multisite WooCommerce store by using the only available stock sync extension for WooCommerce designed for high-level scale.
  • Qala Elastic Enterprise Search – provide your customers with a high-quality search experience and increase sales through content discovery.
  • Qala Elastic Enterprise Filter – built on Enterprise Search, this extension gives you an incredibly fast and accurate way to let potential customers browse your store and discover your products.
  • Qala Minicart – removes the need for a separate shopping cart page, increasing conversion rates.
  • Qala Global Cart – ensures that customers who switch countries in your internationalised WooCommerce store keep their content in the cart.
  • Qala Product Connect – creates links between products in your internationalised WooCommerce store, improving international SEO and enabling Global Cart.
  • Qala Defer – allows us to quickly and cost-effectively adjust website loading properties to increase scores in Google Core Web Vitals.
  • Qala imgproxy – a very powerful and time-saving feature at the infrastructure level that is a panacea for any image optimisation on your website. Your store managers probably have enough to do in the run up to sales, using this feature will save them a ton of time while ensuring your images are as optimised as possible. This solution is only available on higher hosting plans.
• Offer “Back in Stock” notifications – we have a solution that is stress tested and ready to run. If your holiday sales see your most popular products sold out, this feature will allow you to capture some of the excess demand as soon as you can restock.

Are you interested in any of these features?

Things you can do yourself

Here’s a list of what customers tell us they usually work on as the festive season approaches.

• Plan your sales times and promotions – then tell us about them!
• Plan any new website design and functionality you need – again, if you think you need any website updates, please let us know as soon as possible, there’s less than 2 months to go.
• Create content, landing pages and get your ad campaigns ready to run.
• Make sure your analytics are set up correctly – so you can monitor and adjust as sales continue.
• Check your site’s metrics and KPIs:
  • Traffic by source
  • “Site speed (via Google Core Web Vitals – especially on mobile)
  • Key ecommerce statistics 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 service team so they are ready to support all your campaigns and customer queries
• Review your policies (especially for refunds and returns)
• Review your cross-selling and upselling settings
• Consider setting up promotional codes
• Test, test, test!
• Make sure your sites are properly configured for the latest changes to EU VAT with IOSS in WooCommerce

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

To summarise

There is a lot to do! We hope you have a very successful festive season. Please let us know if you think we have missed something on this list. Remember to talk to us about your plans (our experienced Customer Success team will be happy to give you tips!). If you’re not already an Angry Creative customer but are looking for a bulletproof partner to support your festive sales season, then feel free to get in touch, but be quick, time is running out for this year.