Getting Ready for Christmas

Making improvements over last year

[tootalldave]

Hi,
The biggest Christmas season is about to hit us soon.
Just about every year something has hit us that cost us a great amount of lost revenue.

We have created a list of how to avoid these problems.
We posted a few of them below.
Maybe everyone can add to this list from their past experiences.

1. Have a reliable website with a backup plan if widgets.com goes down you send traffic to widgets.net on a different server.

2. A good inventory ( but not to good ) with several different reliable vendors and suppliers to fall back on.

3. Automate, have the software programs do as much of the work for you as possible with a great order tracking system that the customers can access, this is very crucial as in the last 2 weeks you'll need every second of your time getting those orders out not sitting on the phone with worried customers.

4. Use more then one payment processor, the last thing you need is to have your funds frozen for a week when you need to get more inventory or to reach the max limit that they will process for you.
We suggest:
Setting up with your bank if you can then add a couple from the list below as backup.
checkout.google.com
paypal.com
cardservices
2checkout.com

[shri]

Biggest one for me is to get upgraded by mid October. We put that off last year and then found out quickly that the new software could not handle the loads.

[tootalldave]

** Perfect Example**
That's what i'm talking about...
Our first year we we're on a dedicated server with Dell hosting
paying a pretty penny, when Dell decided that the last week of November that they would move their servers to a new building, they estimated that the whole process would cause about 2 hours down time.

We were down for over a week and then it took a week to get our domain on a new server, back then it took much longer for domain names new update on the internet. That was a total of 2 weeks down during the best shopping time of the year.

This year we have a .com .net .info on all different servers/areas with different payment processors.
This may sound a bit extreme, but it's better then sitting there red faced, swearing and losing money.

[shri]

Here's what I had posted in the supporters forum.

T - 12 Weeks:

On the technology site, server hardware and software has been upgraded, this is an annual task for us. Make sure your server is ready go handle christmas.

It is a good idea to make sure that your software is upgraded, this include shopping carts, forums, CMS, back end stuff like MySQL, PHP, Apache etc. Script driven attacks tend to rise during the christmas season.

Don't have a backup strategy. Plan one.. even if it involves simple rsyncs daily.

T - 11 Weeks:

(E) Test your supply chain. Make sure you're 100% sure that they will deliver to you, deliver accurately and on time.

(A) Contact your affiliate managers to find out what they'll be promoting and how.

(C) Start contacting your advertisers, see if they're promoting new products, new campaigns. Consumer Electronics and a lot of niches boost their advertising significantly during x-mas. I'm seeing a lot of enquiries from agencies, which we think will convert for us and boost our ad income nicely.

T - 10 weeks:

Is your content ready?

Put your Links, URLs and content into play now.

After that .. for us it is typically small experiments and tweaking of links, content, shopping pages etc.

[minnapple]

PPC: Bid high on your the best returning products early, before the rest of the bunch, then fade away.