Between big summer blowouts and back-to-school sales, retailers are slotting in time for the biggest shopping season of the year: the winter holidays.

Even though it’s still July, it’s exactly the right time to start thinking about Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and year-end celebrations that drive an influx of cash flow for many product-based businesses.

Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2022, 52 million consumers worldwide spent $7.5 billion with independent brands through Shopify’s ecommerce platform alone. With the right tools, your small business could be benefitting from that big spending.

“Black Friday Cyber Monday showed us once again that consumers are voting with their wallets to support the independent brands they love,” Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said after the 2022 kick-off to the holiday season.

Needless to say, being ready to sell online — and making sure you do sell online if you’re a traditional brick-and-mortar shop — is pivotal in getting a piece of the cyber sales pie. There are three things you should be working on now so you’re ready for the cyber crowds come Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday.

Test and update your website

The last thing you want when it’s gametime is a website that crashes or doesn’t perform well for customers. There are some technical considerations that you can get ahead of now, such as whether your server has capacity for a wave of shoppers. Make sure you’re on a reliable platform that can handle loads of traffic without crashing. Any downtime is ultimately a loss of revenue during bursts of intense online shopping like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The load speed for your website pages is something you can start testing yourself. Shoppers with long wish lists, for themselves as well as friends and family, can easily grow impatient with lengthy load time. The more individual elements on a webpage, particularly items such as high-resolution photos that have a lot of data, the more time it can take to load the product page or shopping cart. Test ways to cut down on your site’s complexity and size to minimize load times.

Nearly three-quarters of consumers who bought from businesses on Shopify last year were shopping on mobile devices, according to the company’s 2022 data. Make sure your website has a mobile view and that it’s easy to navigate. Again, take the time to test out mobile purchasing yourself, and use the months ahead of November to perfect the experience.

Get marketing materials ready

Keep your brand top of mind for returning and potential customers with a marketing campaign that highlights your sales, new products and benefits. Think “free shipping.” Design the campaign with online channels in mind: email, social media, and search. You might consider a mix of paid advertising, earned media coverage and organic posts. Programs like Canva can help you design spiffy marketing materials on a budget.

While it’s important to be part of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, remember to include marketing plans for the month of December, too. Do some research to meet your customers and potential shoppers where they are. Be sure that you ask for permission to send marketing emails and deals to customers during the checkout process; access to a customer’s inbox is valuable and can help convert them into a return buyer.

If you have access to data from previous holiday campaigns, look at what worked and what flopped. Take a look at your financial data; note the days your sales were highest, the products you sold, and what marketing may have triggered the influx of traffic. What can you learn from years past? Put thought into your marketing campaign now to be sure you’re covering your bases for the duration of the holidays.

Get set up with tools to power your success

If your current website needs a little TLC to reach peak performance this holiday season, you’re just in the nick of time. Certum Solutions’ partners can connect your financial software, inventory tracking, and point of sales with a beautiful, user-friendly website to make holiday shopping fun for customers. Book time to talk to our team today about ways to get ready for end-of-year success with an ecommerce site.