Table of Contents
The end-of-year holiday shopping season is both an exciting and challenging time for retailers—especially in terms of e-commerce. While online shopping can expand a retailer’s customer base to encompass the globe, it’s not an endeavor that’s as simple as setting up an online storefront and watching the orders roll in.
To ensure a successful and smooth holiday season, online retailers should carefully review various technology (and tech-adjacent) systems and processes, ranging from cybersecurity to customer experiences. Below, 20 members of Forbes Technology Council detail essential tech-related checkboxes to tick to ensure your technology tools and team members are ready for the busy holiday shopping season.
1. Audit Cybersecurity Systems
For online retailers prepping for the holiday season, a “final checkbox” should be a thorough cybersecurity audit. Ensuring robust protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks, strengthening encryption, updating firewalls and regularly testing for vulnerabilities are crucial steps to safeguard both business operations and customer data during peak shopping periods. – Quang Tuan Dang, Infisical
2. Review Disaster Recovery And Cyber Resilience Strategies
Ahead of the busy holiday season, it’s essential for online retailers to ensure their disaster recovery and cyber resilience strategies are robust and proactive. By implementing a comprehensive and fulsome DR and business resiliency plan, including immutable backups, redundancy measures and a clear recovery process, retailers can minimize downtime, mitigate risk and ensure seamless operations. – Jack Dziak, Recovery Point Systems
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
3. Set And Configure Tracking Pixels
Make sure your tracking pixels are set and configured accurately. Growing your traffic exponentially is a great way to capture and remarket to your set of visitors, some of whom may not be ready to buy right away. The fourth quarter is a strong season from start to end—you have plenty of opportunities to convert if your audience is captured correctly. – Mario Peshev, Rush.app
4. Conduct Load Testing And Implement Redundancies
Be sure to cover load testing and redundancies. Implement redundancies in hosting and servers to minimize downtime. This could involve having backup servers or utilizing cloud-based solutions that automatically switch to alternate servers in case of an issue. Conduct thorough load testing to ensure the platform can handle a surge in traffic during peak shopping periods. – Ronald Griffin, SEEN
5. Refresh Employees’ Cybersecurity Training
Retailers must focus on hardening their security posture prior to the holiday season. Initiatives should include ensuring systems and devices have critical patches and updates and investing in employee training. It’s important that employees receive cybersecurity training so they understand common cybersecurity threats and how threat actors exploit personnel to gain access to an environment. – Jason James, Aptos
6. Prioritize Website Scalability And Performance Testing
To prepare for the holiday shopping season, online retailers should prioritize website scalability and performance testing. This involves simulating high traffic to ensure the site won’t crash, stress-testing to identify limits, optimizing based on test outcomes and having fallback plans for unexpected spikes. A well-prepared site prevents lost sales and protects brand reputation. – Aatish M, Strac
7. Set Up Event-Driven Architecture
The underlying software infrastructure must be able to handle sudden traffic and demand surges caused by holiday deals and promotions. Event-driven architecture is designed to help retailers deal with this “burst” data, dynamically distributing orders when and where needed to prevent systems from being overwhelmed and online orders from being delayed or lost. – Denis King, Solace
8. Ensure Your Tech Staff Is Ready
To optimize for the holiday rush, online retailers should brief staff on expected traffic and minimize noncritical code updates. Set up advanced monitoring tools, and have engineers on standby. Prioritize system scalability and enhance server capabilities, and accelerate content delivery for faster user access. Adhering to these measures guarantees seamless shopping during high-demand periods. – Ivan Mashey, Attract Group
9. Leverage AI To Create Personalized Shopping Experiences
Artificial intelligence is transforming the shopping experience for both customers and retailers. It’s not only optimizing internal stock management processes, but it’s also able to tailor experiences to each consumer. Creating a personalized experience helps ensure consumers see relevant products, improving product discovery processes, which in return increases customer satisfaction, reduces returns and improves loyalty. – Olga Dogadkina, Emperia
10. Have Anomaly Prediction Systems In Place
Make sure that you have “anomaly prediction”—not just detection—systems in place so that you are ready to take action before a problem arises. Anomalies may not only be indicators of fraud (which may increase rapidly this season due to the use of generative AI), but could also be new technologies, such as automation, AI and recently deployed generative AI, causing unexpected system behaviors. – Zehra Cataltepe, TAZI AI
11. Optimize Your WAF
In finalizing holiday prep, retailers should optimize their Web application firewalls. This entails setting security policies, enforcing stringent input validation, applying rate limiting and incorporating geo-blocking, IP blocklisting and bot defenses. These measures ensure the safety of customer data, transaction integrity and consistent website availability throughout the peak season. – Christopher Yang, Away
12. Implement A Recapturing Strategy
It’s no secret that consumers look to get good deals over the holidays and during events such as Black Friday. To tackle this, we’ve seen lots of retailers setting up their own holiday-themed coupon pages that use pay-per-click to recapture customers who leave their sites to search for vouchers on Google. If you don’t have something in place, there’s no guarantee that a customer will return. – Simon Bird, RevLifter
13. Engage With Mobile Customers
Online retailers need to zero in on the “Cyber 5” period (the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) with an eye toward e-commerce. Mobile shopping drove more than half of 2022 Cyber 5 sales. The week beforehand is the optimal window to begin delighting existing shoppers and engaging with new ones via mobile. From in-app campaigns to push notifications, retailers can pre-promote their deals to convert users and drive meaningful revenue. – Katie Madding, Adjust
14. Review And Reduce Third-Party Risk
Most retail technology, such as point-of-sale systems, is provided via third-party vendors. Any incident at a vendor has a direct impact on the retailer—remember the Target breach. Retailers need to focus on reducing third-party risk. Start by identifying who you do business with, determining how ingrained they are within your business and minimizing critical points of risk to avoid any impact on operations. – Fred Kneip, ProcessUnity
15. Review And Update Your Automated Customer Support Systems
Review and update your customer support knowledge base, AI chatbots, and order-related integrations and automations to ensure that customers can get quick answers to their questions without impacting your support team. Additionally, double-check that your support tool is set up to take advantage of generative AI features to help agents summarize and respond while maintaining your voice and brand. – Jeremy Suriel, Kustomer
16. Evaluate Cloud Infrastructure
The retail industry faces rising security risks and network strain during the holidays, which is why evaluating cloud infrastructures must be on retailers’ checklists. Many point-of-sale systems are network-based, making redundant and scalable connections crucial. Taking a hosted private cloud approach enhances security and reduces the risk of downtime, which can have a big impact on the customer experience. – Jason Carolan, Flexential
17. Bridge Online And Physical Stores
Online retailers must bridge their online and physical stores for a crucial final checklist item. Ensure your online store seamlessly connects with your retail locations. This drives more relevant traffic to your e-commerce site and ensures immediate customer satisfaction, resulting in higher conversion rates and cost savings on shipping. – Zohar Gilad, Fast Simon Inc.
18. Ensure Online Information Is Accurate
Make sure any online information and offers from your company are up to date in the platforms you work with to maximize your earning potential for the busy shopping season. If you’re working with an affiliate platform, for example, and your program details don’t match the reality of your program, you risk being excluded from promotions, especially those driven by algorithms and third-party platforms. – Jordan Glazier, Wildfire Systems
19. Analyze Customer Behavior From Previous Years
Online retailers should analyze customer behavior in their online marketplace from previous years to ensure their online interface is set up to drive sales and lead customers toward historically popular products. By doing this, they can ensure they are creating a user-friendly customer experience and accurately forecasting supply and demand. – Mark Anderson, Alteryx
20. Establish Plans For Post-Holiday Engagement
Don’t forget post-holiday engagement—ensure that proper follow-ups and requests for reviews and feedback happen right after the shopping season ends. Though it’s easier to strategize for aggressive holiday marketing and sales, the final checkbox must be ensuring your customers don’t feel that you’re one of the many online retailers that are “gone with the holiday season.” – Nitesh Sinha, Sacumen