10 Tips to Prepare E-Retailers for the 2011 Holiday Season

With more consumers than ever planning to visit e-commerce sites in search of holiday gifts, now is the time for e-retailers to gear up in preparation for the year's most lucrative shopping season. Those retailers unprepared for a busy holiday season could lose out on sales, leading to the demise of their company. Clearly it's worth spending time planning for the season.

overstockArt.com understands the value of a well-executed holiday sales plan. Thanks to holiday sales preparedness last year, the retailer enjoyed a 24.25 percent increase in holiday sales compared to the previous year.

Here are 10 tips overstockArt.com recommends to help your company optimize its holiday sales this year:

1. Start the preparation with a brainstorming session. This session should focus on what worked and what didn't work in the past to help you determine areas of strength as well as those that need improvement this holiday season. Include employees from all parts of the company and challenge them to provide a creative idea that could be implemented during the holiday season. This is a great way to get the entire company on the same page this holiday season.

2. Make needed website improvements to accommodate holiday traffic. Optimize your site for speed and functionality. Once all improvements are planned, make sure you have a hard date for a code freeze. It's not recommended to do any improvements during the holiday season as mistakes can be very costly.

3. Make sure your shelves are stocked and you have the inventory available to attain your sales goals. Inventory is a delicate balance involving cash, sales, space and projection of which items will sell. It's not an exact science, but an accurate forecast could mean the difference between success or failure.

4. Have the right, well-trained employees in place. There are many areas in your organization that will be impacted during the holiday rush, but the main ones are shipping and customer service. These areas must be covered the right way. Make sure you're staffed properly, especially on extreme selling days such as Cyber Monday.

5. Perform stress tests on your internal systems. Make sure you have enough phone lines to handle the additional volume, manual order entry systems that work flawlessly, and production and warehouse operations that are ready and efficient.

6. Ramp up your advertising mix. Any productive dollar spent during the year will become more productive during the holiday season. One item to pay close attention to is cost-per-click (CPC) advertising. If you're using a firm to manage your CPC account, have it come up with a scheduled increase of your spend. This will allow you time to monitor and fine-tune the increases and make sure that you're investing in the right keywords.

7. Plan direct mail and catalog drops to be done in time for consumers to make holiday purchases. When planning direct mail campaigns consider timing as it relates to specific days during the holiday season. Keep in mind the time required for consumers to make buying decisions as well as the time your company needs to fulfill the orders prior to the holiday.

8. Email deliverability should be a major consideration. Ensure that your customers are receiving your emails. Review open and clickthrough rates and profitability matrices such as close ratio and dollar per visitor. This will help in the detail planning of your holiday email campaigns, assuring the profitability of this marketing channel.

9. Schedule promotions throughout the entire two months of the holiday season. This includes email promotions to your subscribers, Facebook promotions and sweepstakes, Twitter specials, and a schedule of daily-deal partnerships with companies such as Groupon.

10. Review your shipping cutoff date and return policy and have them posted on your website early in the season. Consumers want to know that the gift they're buying will be there before the holiday. They also want to ensure their gift recipients will be able to return the gifts, so an extended return policy is a good idea.

Admittedly this isn't an exhaustive list, but these are the most important areas for an online retailer to focus on so that they're prepared to capitalize on the season of giving. Enjoy the season and happy selling!

David Sasson is CEO of overstockArt.com. Amitai Sasson is vice president for marketing and development for overstockArt.com. David can be reached at dsasson@overstockart.com and Amitai can be reached at asasson@overstockart.com.