In 2020, the holiday season dropshipping sales in the US are projected to be $135 billion. Above 72% say they will decorate their homes for the holidays. According to NRF, shoppers who planned to celebrate the holidays last year have planned to spend $63 per person on holiday shopping.This shows how holiday season purchases still hold immense value and can be a game-changer for your dropshipping store. Continue reading to learn how to prepare your dropshipping business for the holiday shopping.

Talk To Your Suppliers about Holiday Shopping In Advance

Managing the status of inventories is probably the most difficult yet important aspect to handle in a dropshipping business. For instance, if you get a massive number of orders during holiday shopping, and your supplier is not prepared for them, you could end up losing customers. So, the first step you should take to prepare your dropshipping business for the holiday shopping is to have a conversation with your suppliers.Speak to them about how much they can accommodate and set up a process for the organization. Do this before the holiday season begins, so you have a clear understanding of what needs to be taken care of and a fallback plan if anything goes wrong.

Review Your Policies

You can’t have your standard store policies running during the holiday shopping season if you don’t want to exhaust your operation on sorting out exchanges, returns/refunds, and other order fulfillment issues.To avoid this, clearly state store policies telling users how to proceed with refunds and returns during sales. This will not only ensure consumers are informed about your policies, but it’ll also instill trust in your online store and shows you are committed to the excellent customer.

Develop an Advertising Plan and Budget for Holiday Shopping

You’ll indeed see loyal customers shopping from you during holidays, but you’ll also acquire many new shoppers. Before the season kicks in, it’s best to prepare an advertising plan and budget. 91% of customers are more likely to shop with brands and stores that provide relevant offers and recommendations, which makes advertising important during holiday shopping.Before laying out your plan, assess your most profitable channels. Know where you get the most customers from. Holiday seasons aren’t the time to experiment and invest in new advertising channels. Instead, you should double down on strategies that have worked best for you in the past and optimize them for better results.

Plan Your Holiday Site Theme

Holiday sales aren’t solely about listing products at slashed prices on the website. It’s about creating a memorable store experience for the customers, so they’re pulled towards making a purchase and referring them to their friends. Refreshing your website with a holiday shopping theme is an amazing way to show your store is ready to bring in some festive cheer.If it’s Christmas, customize your store with LED lights, snow trees, and red and white colors to help customers relate to the holiday. These personalized experiences go a long way in building customer retention. You can also use data from your previous sales to study customer behavior and see how you should optimize and organize the store for increasing sales.

Know About the Top-Selling Products

Not all products are sold at the same rate. But if you can identify and bump up top-selling products, you will end up making higher sales. Above offering a range of products, positioning your best-selling products will help you drive more conversions and make customers curious to explore your store further.To discover these products, you can study customer purchase history for the past 9-12 months and pick the products with the highest sales. Identify if the product would be relevant during the holiday season, and add it accordingly. Analyze your previous holiday shopping purchase history, and cherry-pick those products which sold massively.Consider bringing them in again or including an upgrade to those products to boost sales. Once you’ve made a list of those top-selling products, you can position them strategically throughout the website and run promotions on them to attract more customers.

Conduct a Load Test to Handle the Traffic Surge

The holiday shopping can put a lot of pressure on your website regarding increased site visitors, overburdened servers, and glitches in third-party integrations. This can show errors to shoppers or lead to a slow load time, which can severely impact their shopping experience, and thus your sales.How to tackle this is to conduct a load test to ensure your site servers have enough capacity to handle sudden spikes in traffic. This allows you to assess how your website reacts to traffic surges and gives you an idea of the potential bugs that can cause issues. If you identify any issue after running the load test, you can make improvements and optimizations to create a seamless shopping experience for customers.

Wrapping Up

The holiday shopping season offers massive scope for dropshipping stores to ramp up their profits. You can take it further with creative marketing strategies, website optimization, sales promotion tactics, and product experimentation.Make sure you turn the holiday season into a highly profitable quarter for your dropshipping business, but that’s if you’re prepared for it. Use this article as a checklist to prepare your dropshipping business for the holiday shopping. Get ready to welcome happy shoppers!

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