In 2025, more than 130 million consumers shopped Cyber Week deals, accounting for billions in online sales revenue. With holiday spending steadily rising, it is increasingly challenging for retailers to compete.
We’ve helped leading brands navigate holiday shopping for nearly 30 years. We know what comes with the territory: traffic spikes, inventory and fulfillment shifts, increased customer expectations, and more. And in that time, we’ve also seen several common mistakes that retailers make that cost them sales every time.
Below, we break these mistakes down and walk through exactly how you can avoid them.
Mistake #1: Waiting Until Fall to Prep Your eCommerce Site
Whether you’re launching a multi-channel marketing campaign, running a new promotion, or looking to integrate new technology on your site before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, one of the biggest mistakes retailers make is waiting too long to get started. The brands that will succeed during the holiday rush have already spent months preparing their tech stack, optimizing their site, and refining their marketing strategy. Holiday prep isn’t a last-minute rush; it’s months of following an intentional roadmap.
The Fix: Lay the Groundwork for Holiday Commerce in July
Holiday preparations should begin in late summer (July-August). During this time, back-to-school season is in full swing, providing invaluable information to your team about where your site and commerce strategy can be improved. Starting early gives you enough time to prepare for holiday code freeze, which usually happens between late October and early November. After this point, making any significant changes to your site could lead to bugs, delays, or breakdowns in the customer experience and cost you sales.
The following is a good rule of thumb for holiday prep milestones:
July – August – Map your holiday eCommerce strategy and begin testing and preparing your site. Look at previous sales data to forecast demand and order inventory early. Plan your marketing calendar and promotions.
September – Lock in fulfillment partners and map out shipping details. Segment your audiences for targeted marketing and produce holiday assets (photos, ad creative, etc.).
October – Publish holiday content like gift guides and leverage user-generated content like ratings and reviews in your marketing. Update your customer support team with refreshed FAQs, streamline your workflows, and train seasonal support staff. Stress-test your site for speed, mobile optimization, and seamless checkout flow.
November – December – Launch your BFCM and holiday sales, monitor inventory levels, and post shipping cutoffs to ensure customers receive their gifts on time.
And while the holiday season technically ends in December, the way you handle holiday returns and customer service issues in January has a greater impact on your bottom line than you may realize. 84% of customers say that a positive returns experience encourages them to shop with a retailer again. Capitalize on holiday success through the new year by focusing on retention and customer experience.
Mistake #2: Neglecting Customer Support
Increases in traffic typically also bring an influx in customers seeking support. Your store may not see a large volume of customer service requests throughout the year, but a common mistake retailers make is failing to prepare their customer service teams for the holiday rush. Even small and midsize retailers experience peaks in customer questions, complaints, and returns during the holiday season.
The Fix: Bake Customer Service into Your Site and Workflows
Build customer support into your year-round operations, not just your BFCM strategy. One way to do this is to implement a Q&A section on product pages, as well as ratings and reviews to help answer product questions without intervention from your team. Reviews increase purchase likelihood and reduce return rates. Conversely, if shoppers can’t find an answer to a product question quickly, they are far more likely to abandon their online purchase. Tools like Revere can help you leverage user-generated content to improve the customer experience and lighten your customer service team’s workload.
In the months leading up to the holidays, you should also provide your team with messaging templates for common FAQs (i.e. How long will shipping take for my order? Can I exchange items?). Revere surfaces trends across customer UGC, so you can also flag potential issues early and prepare your team to handle them.
Mistake #3: Overlooking Technical Site Performance
No amount of flashy holiday marketing campaigns will make up for a clunky or broken user experience on your site. When holiday traffic spikes, too many user requests can overload your servers, resulting in a crash that could cost millions in revenue. Over the years, we have seen many retailers fail to optimize site performance or measure it effectively in the months leading up to Cyber Week, leading to last-minute scrambles and costly breakdowns.
The Fix: Stress-Test Your Site Early and Often
A great way to identify areas of improvement when it comes to website performance is through load testing, which simulates a high number of users performing different actions on your site to test how it will perform during unpredictable shifts in traffic.
If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to optimizing eCommerce site performance, schedule a free site assessment with the Virid team. We audit every aspect of your site and provide personalized insights to help you accelerate growth.
Mistake #4: Failing to Forecast Accurately
A common mistake many retailers make when preparing for the holidays is overestimating their inventory, resulting in revenue loss as orders are canceled due to insufficient stock. Not only does running out of product cause you to lose sales, but it can also permanently damage your reputation with customers.
The Fix: Analyze Historical Data and Leave a Margin for Error
It’s not possible to predict exactly how many orders will be placed during high-traffic periods, but it’s best to over-order than to find yourself running low. You’ll want to start by analyzing historical data to get a thorough understanding of which products you will likely need more of, then communicate with your suppliers to ensure the additional inventory will be available when you need it. Once you’ve decided how much stock you’ll need, place orders early to make sure you have enough product to last through the entire holiday season and even through mid-January, as you won’t want to have to rush to order more as soon as the holidays are over.
Mistake #5: Using One-Size-Fits-All Marketing
Many retailers don’t prioritize marketing when preparing for the holidays, resulting in rushed or low-value campaigns that don’t convert. If you’re not building a thoughtful, personalized, targeted, cross-channel marketing campaign this year, you may be missing an opportunity to connect with more customers during the holiday rush.
The Fix: Create Highly Personalized Marketing Campaigns
To avoid additional costs and loss of revenue, retailers should start by cleaning up their CMS to ensure customer data is up to date and accurate. 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant, personalized offers and recommendations. Audience segmentation can help you reach the right customers at the right time and build deeper connections that enhance brand loyalty. Lastly, ensure you’re launching your marketing campaigns early, so you don’t reach potential customers after they’ve already made their decisions.
Mistake #6: Leaving Friction in the Checkout Process
The checkout page is where 70% of customers decide to abandon their carts and shop elsewhere, which is why the checkout process is such an important part of your site’s UX. Retailers who don’t put enough energy into optimizing the checkout process will lose sales because of unnecessary friction.
The Fix: Regularly Test and Optimize Your Checkout Flow
You should regularly test your checkout flow, especially on mobile, so that you can remove pain points from the process. The best way to optimize checkout is to reduce the number of fields required to finish the transaction, offer as many payment options as possible, make sure your site is accessible, and be transparent about what customers should expect as early in the customer journey as possible to improve the customer experience and increase eCommerce revenue during the holidays.
Mistake #7: Failing to Track and Measure Key Metrics
You will never know if your holiday strategy is effective if you don’t measure it. Many retailers get caught up in the stress of the holidays and forget to track what worked and what didn’t. This may not impact your holiday success this year, but it will make it more difficult to prepare for the following years.
The Fix: Build Reporting into Your Standard eCommerce Operations
Historical data helps you order stock, plan marketing campaigns, and brace for the impact of unpredictable traffic surges. To ensure you don’t repeat mistakes in the future, take advantage of the goldmine of data available to you during the holidays by tracking key metrics across your website and marketing channels. Set up your reporting dashboards before the season starts, not after, so you’re capturing clean data from day one rather than trying to backfill gaps in December.
At a minimum, you should track the following:
- Average Order Value (AOV)
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Checkout and Cart Abandonment Rate
- Site Traffic and Sources
- Stockout Rate
- Shipping and Fulfillment Time
Once the season wraps, schedule a post-holiday review with your team to identify what drove results, where you lost customers, and which channels delivered the strongest ROI. Learn from what worked and what didn’t so you can start the new year off strong.
Final Thoughts
Regardless of how you approach the holiday season, having the strategic partner in your corner can make all the difference. Virid’s Unified Commerce Solution combines our cutting-edge eCommerce platform, marketAgility, deep integration expertise, and hands-on partnership. As you grow, our solution scales with you, simplifying complexity and keeping commerce running flawlessly.
Whether you need help stress-testing your site, refining your UX, or building a smarter reporting workflow, our team has spent nearly 30 years helping retailers get holiday-ready. Schedule a consultation today to learn more about how Virid can help you get ahead this holiday season.
