Holiday Ramp-Up: Tips and TricksWhat you need to know to survive and thrive

during the holiday shopping rush

Graham Leckie, Operations ManagerDemac Media

Introduction

Graham LeckieSr Manager, Operations and Special ProjectsDemac Media

Twitter: @gleckie85, @demacmedia

Overview

• What the holidays mean• Code Freeze• Inventory• Email Campaigns• Sales• System Infrastructure• Planning ahead – 2014• Discussion

What the Holidays Mean

• Increased:– Concurrent users– Sales/promotions– Revenue and hopefully profit!– Hours!!!

• Big dates:– Black Friday– Cyber Monday– Christmas– Boxing Day

Code Freeze!

• Make sure to have all development solid and on production (tested) by mid-October

• Table any new development ideas or initiatives for development over the season on staging

Inventory

• Limit customer service issues with correct counts– Eg. Phone calls, emails etc

• Buying should be complete– Inventory from manufactures hard to come by

Email Campaigns

• Segment your lists• Do not send a blast to the whole list at once• Test all links externally before sending• NEVER use a search string as a link in the mailing• Cache pages that are going to be visited• Tell a story, not just the sale (higher value items)• Mobile Friendly / cross platform– In 2012, 45% of holiday emails opened on a mobile

device– Make sure that UX is favorable and they can actually buy!

Sales

• Make sure all content is in place before the 11th hour• CMS content staged ahead of time• Test on a staging environment if available• Site wide sales can be a bit tricky– Especially with catalog updates as opposed to cart rules

• Test all rules for all segments before hand• Cross-sell/up-sell for loss leaders – target attach!• Index/Cache completed• Drive traffic as well from social media

System Infrastructure

• Risk Mitigation– Know what to do if the site goes down

• Ability to spin up VMs on demand?• Stress Testing ahead of time– Staged environment– Server ‘attacks’

• Overall server health & specs

Staff Awareness

• Team knowledge of ‘the holidays’ – Especially for new employees

• Incentives for extra hours – Examples: pizza, liquid refreshers, coffee– Saves from them having to go offsite

• Customer service is key– Know how to make a customer happy– Replacement for ‘hot’ items that go out of stock – inventory

fulfillment issues• SMILE!

Planning Ahead - 2014

• What to do to fill in the valley (Jan/Feb)• Incentives for return shoppers in the new year• Deploy what was in development over the

holidays– New features/functionality– Code audit/clean up

Discussion Time

Happy Holidays!

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