11 Tips for Holiday Store Prep

It’s late October, and the holidays are closer than they look. Black Friday is Nov. 27, Cyber Monday is Nov. 30, and plenty of shoppers have already started. Adobe expects $95.8 billion in U.S. online spending this October alone.

For online sellers, the next few weeks are the window to get ready.

Here are 11 ways to prepare your store for the holiday season.

1. Develop Discounts & Sales

Decide on your promotions now, before you’re reacting to everyone else’s. Free shipping over a set amount, buy one get one, a bundle price, a gift with purchase, or a straight percentage off can all work. Run the numbers on your margin first, including platform fees and holiday shipping surcharges.

Most ecommerce platforms, Shopify included, let you create discount codes limited to specific products, dates, or a set number of uses. Use that to give each channel its own offer, like one code for your email list and another for social followers. It gives people a reason to follow you in more than one place, and it shows you which channel drove the sale.

2. Prepare for Product Substitutions

With print-on-demand, there’s no stockroom to count, but the blanks behind your designs can still run low or be discontinued, sometimes with little notice. This year, several Bella+Canvas women’s styles were discontinued effective immediately.

Pick a backup blank now for each of your best sellers, like a second black tee in a similar weight and fit, and order a sample so you know how your design prints on it. Check CustomCat Updates each week for catalog changes, so you can swap a listing before a customer orders something that’s unavailable. If you ever need to substitute a product, tell the customer before it ships.

3. Decorate Your Store for the Holidays

A holiday look tells visitors right away that you’re ready for gift shoppers. Swap your homepage banner, feature your gift guide and best sellers up top, and put your “order by” dates where people will see them. That date does more for urgency than any amount of tinsel.

Carry the same look to your social profiles with a seasonal banner, a festive version of your profile image, and a pinned post pointing to your holiday collection. Keep it light: your store should still load fast and look like your brand.

4. Plan Your Email Campaigns

Your customers’ inboxes are about to fill up. Stand out with offers that are specific to them: early access for past buyers, a code just for subscribers, a gift guide based on what they bought last year.

Give every offer an end date, and send a reminder before it expires. Before volume picks up, confirm your sending domain is authenticated and focus on subscribers who actually open and click. Our holiday marketing checklist covers the details.

5. Personalize Your Ads

Ad platforms like Meta now handle much of the audience targeting automatically, which means your creative does more of the work of reaching the right people.

Build ads around specific gifting situations: “for the coffee-obsessed coworker,” “matching family tees for the holiday photo,” “for the dog mom in your life.” Test a few angles per product, then put more budget behind the ones that convert. Use your customer lists, like past buyers and email subscribers, to show returning customers something different from first-time visitors.

6. Keep Remarketing in Mind

We’ve all been there. You find the perfect gift for Aunt Betty in October, there’s no rush to buy, and by December you’ve forgotten what it was.

Remarketing keeps that from happening to your customers by showing ads to people who’ve already visited your store or added something to their cart. Install the Meta Pixel with the Conversions API and confirm your Google tag is tracking purchases. Send people back to the product they looked at, and stop once they buy or once it’s too late to deliver by Christmas.

7. Create Gift Guides

How many times have you searched “gift ideas for mom”? Plenty of shoppers start there, and more of them now ask an AI assistant the same question. A gift guide makes your store the answer.

Break it into sections by recipient and by price, link every item directly, and feature the guide on your homepage, in your emails, and on social.

8. Make Your Social Posts Shoppable

Picture someone scrolling on a Sunday morning. They see your post for a sweatshirt that’s perfect for their best friend, but there’s no link. They search for your store, can’t find the item, and give up.

Product tags fix that. Connect your product catalog to Instagram and Facebook (Shopify and other platforms can sync it for you), then tag products in posts, Reels, and Stories. Since September 2025, Facebook and Instagram shops send shoppers to your own website to check out, so make sure every tag lands on a working product page. Pinterest product pins are worth setting up too, since a lot of people use Pinterest to plan gifts.

9. Rethink Your Return Policy

Gifts get returned, and holiday shoppers want to know the policy before they buy. For print-on-demand, a very loose policy can get expensive, since a personalized item can’t be resold. Aim for clear rather than lenient:

• State what you cover, like misprints, defects, and damage in transit, and how size exchanges work.
• Consider extending the window for holiday orders into January, since gifts get opened late.
• Ask for a photo with any replacement request, and say so in your policy.
• Make sure your policy lines up with what your fulfillment partner covers. Here’s CustomCat’s returns policy.

Once requests start coming in, a helpdesk tool like Freshdesk or Gorgias can help you sort and track them.

10. Make Sure Your Site Is Working

Traffic climbs as ads and holiday searches pick up, and a slow or confusing site loses sales fast. Adobe expects 57.4% of holiday online spending to happen on mobile, so test on your phone first.

Run your key pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. The usual culprits are oversized images, too many apps or plugins, heavy themes, and third-party scripts. Then click through the full path from homepage to checkout and fix broken links, outdated banners, and anything that takes too many taps.

11. Invest in Live Chat & Customer Service

Plenty of people shop at the last minute, and last-minute shoppers have questions. Will it arrive in time? What’s your return policy? Where’s my order? Shoppers who get a quick answer are more likely to buy.

Add live chat (most ecommerce platforms have a built-in option or an app for it) and publish an FAQ that covers shipping times, order-by dates, and returns. An AI chat tool loaded with your real policies and holiday dates can cover after-hours questions, as long as order problems get handed to a person. More in Holiday Customer Service Tips.

The holidays are the busiest stretch of the year for most online stores. A few hours of prep now saves a lot of scrambling in December. For a full to-do list, see our Ecommerce Marketing Checklist for the Holidays.