With the holiday season already upon us, most retailers have already prepared their technology support teams in anticipation of the increased volume and criticality of keeping all sales channels operating smoothly during this busy shopping period. However, it’s never too late to evaluate some additional necessary steps towards ensuring the right processes and tests have been validated to proactively support a successful 2025 holiday period.
Below are several last-minute preparation tips around technology checks, system resilience and corporate support processes that should help ensure a successful holiday season across both store and online shopping.
- Pricing and Promotion Alignment
- Sometimes even the smallest discrepancies between in-store and online channels can generate intense customer frustration and dissatisfaction around pricing and promotions. Therefore, it’s key to have a cross-functional group meet to validate that the right pricing and promotions are in place and tested across all sales channels.
- Performing “Dry Run” Failure Tests for your Key Technology Systems
- The biggest threat to holiday peak sales is system failure (POS, E-commerce, OMS). A last-minute check should focus on resilience, not just performance. This means that you should not only test for high-volume, but ensure your commerce systems can correctly recover from a failover for even non-critical components (single register down in stores, external API from websites, etc.). Run test purchases on backup systems to ensure transactions can still properly flow even if when primary registers or website components are down.
- As many lanes do not get fully utilized during regular shopping periods, be sure to test store peripherals such as scanners, cash registers, and printers to ensure operational efficiency and get them serviced now with any software updates or replacements.
- Staffing Validation for Holiday Shifts & Holiday Support Tasks
- Be sure that you don’t treat shifts in the stores or for corporate support like other weeks of the year. Just because staff is signed up, perform some double-checks on both availability AND expectations during those periods around the type of problems they may encounter. Run through some dry run scenarios that validate staff know how to follow the right escalation path for critical issues that helps minimize any down-time for operations support.
- Also be sure that store resources have the necessary supplies (bags, receipt paper, item tags, ship-from-store boxes, etc.) on-hand to support the extra volume of the holiday season.
- Batch Jobs and Integration
- With website traffic peaks and extended store hours, be sure the nightly batch jobs are set to adequately process "out of the norm" volumes and timings during the holiday period. Also be sure that IT teams account for additional processing time associated with higher that average price update files or promotional files to both POS and e-commerce systems during and just after peak holiday periods.
Retailers have been successfully supporting holiday sales for decades, but each year there are countless tales of technology issues that cause significant sales disruption. It’s critical that retailers think through all of the various nuances of increased customer traffic, purchases, returns and customer service inquiries. By planning for some of these worst-case scenarios, retailers will have a greater chance of navigating what is sure to be a critical 2025 holiday shopping season.
