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October 2, 2025
Content Writer, Bizrate Insights
Updated 10/25: The following blog is adapted from Bizrate Insights’ past library of white papers and guides that we’ve made publicly available. Enjoy!
The summer sales slowdown — the period when consumers put down their devices and spend more time outdoors or on vacation — is an all-too-real phenomenon for retailers. Despite sales cooling down, the summer months are a valuable window for companies to prep for the most pivotal stretch of the year: the holiday shopping season.
Less website traffic frees up more time and resources for your company. Proactive ecommerce professionals can use the summer months to prepare their businesses before the highest traffic months of the annual shopping cycle begin.
This guide focuses on four areas of your business that should be closely examined during the summer months and offers steps for perfecting each of them:
Read on to learn how you can take advantage of the ecommerce summer sales slowdown. By capitalizing on the time you have now, you’ll be able to set your business up for success in the busy months ahead.
You will likely have data on how your company performed during the previous holiday season. Did final sales totals fall short of projections? Were there any unforeseen roadblocks that kept you from achieving your goals? Was there an uptick in returns following the holidays?
These are all great questions to ask as you formulate your plan for this year’s holiday shopping season. Consider taking the following steps to improve your strategy further.
Determine what didn’t work for your company in the past and understand how you can improve for the future: These are the primary goals of any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis.
Performing a SWOT analysis is a proven method that can help your company identify its key strengths and weaknesses. By taking time to acknowledge what your company does well, where there is room for improvement, and how it stacks up to competitors, you can develop a roadmap that builds on strengths while minimizing weaknesses.
When done right, a SWOT analysis will help ecommerce retailers achieve long-term success by revealing which areas of their businesses should be addressed with the limited resources available to them.
It’s always been important for ecommerce professionals to stay up to date on the latest news and best practices. But following one of the most hectic years in the history of retail, keeping tabs on industry trends has never been more critical.
Heading into the 2021 holiday shopping season, lingering supply constraints — an adverse effect of the pandemic — have caused delayed shipping times and inflated prices. This year, fragile supply chains have the potential to continue last season’s trend of consumers starting their online holiday shopping early.
Accurate demand forecasting will be even more valuable in 2021 as many companies struggle to manage their supply chains into the foreseeable future. Anticipating and planning for any supply issues now will help you manage customer expectations when the holiday shopping season is in full swing.
Improving the journey customers go through when interacting with an ecommerce retailer is crucial to both short- and long-term success. Prioritizing and optimizing each of your customer touchpoints will ensure overall satisfaction while building customer loyalty for the future.
More and more consumers are comfortable researching and purchasing products using smartphones. In 2020, 73% of U.S. consumers used smartphones for shopping online during Thanksgiving weekend, while 70% did the same during Cyber Week, according to consumers starting their online holiday shopping early. and Forrester, a leading global research and advisory firm. As you take time to evaluate your company’s customer journey, be sure your online store offers a flawless experience for product discovery and checkout on mobile devices, particularly smartphones.
Consumer safety concerns and statewide public health restrictions helped drive a record year for U.S. ecommerce sales in 2020, according to estimates by Digital Commerce 360. By the start of the 2020 holiday shopping season, an influx of online orders led many to believe a shipping bottleneck was imminent, causing consumers to explore new fulfillment methods.
Last year, 42% of consumers chose buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) and curbside pickup as alternative fulfillment methods. While at-home delivery was still the top fulfillment choice for online shoppers, Bizrate Insights projects that the use of BOPIS and curbside pickup will continue to grow throughout 2021.
Buyers want choice when it comes time to select a fulfillment method. Investing in store-based delivery processes, which requires implementing new software and training employees, will help consumers get their deliveries sooner and in more ways this holiday season.
The summer is prime time for enhancing your website. Reduced traffic gives your company the time it needs to improve the existing functions of its website and test new software. During the summer months, address the following technical elements to ready your online store in time for the holiday rush.
A voice-of-customer (VoC) feedback solution is an efficient, cost-effective method for ecommerce retailers looking to enhance elements of their customer experience. By investing in and implementing VoC software during the summer, you’ll be able to gain data-driven insights that help fix customer pain points before the holiday shopping season.
The right software will cover the entirety of your customer journey. With real-time feedback tools included with VoC solutions like Bizrate Insights’ survey solutions, your support team can monitor and address customer concerns as they arise. Regularly surveying customers also helps foster brand loyalty by showing that you value their feedback.
Reassuring customers that your website is a secure place to shop and complete transactions is fundamental to the success of any ecommerce retailer in 2021. With major hacks and data leaks increasingly dominating the news cycle, you must take steps to shore up security vulnerabilities so consumers feel confident they can shop safely at your online store.
Forrester predicted that attacks on web applications, exploitation of lost or stolen goods, software vulnerability, and use of stolen credentials would all increase this year. However, the level of security measures your company can take largely depends on the complexity of its operations and the capabilities of its IT team.
Here are some general cybersecurity best practices to consider implementing in anticipation of the holidays:
An overly complicated checkout system or a confusing page layout can become major roadblocks for your customers, making it essential that you frequently evaluate and update the features of your site. That’s where A/B testing comes in.
Summer is the ideal time for A/B testing because you most likely have the breathing room to add and adjust new features to your site without the risk of disrupting traffic on peak shopping days. Some potential areas you can explore further with A/B testing include new product page designs, updated website copy, different CTAs, special promotions or offers, and more. By the end of the summer, you should have finalized and launched all changes to your website in time for the holiday shopping season.
Consumers will be inundated with marketing emails, sponsored posts, and special offers weeks before major holiday shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday kick off. With so many messages coming at shoppers from every direction, your company’s marketing team faces the monumental task of cutting through all the noise.
Before website traffic heats up, use the summer to perfect your marketing approach for the holidays. Start by looking into these three areas.
The downtime associated with the summer sales slowdown creates an excellent opportunity for marketers to explore new lead-generating options. Begin by assessing the performance of strategies and campaigns used during the 2020 holiday season. Once you’ve established a baseline for what did and didn’t work, you’ll be able to plot this year’s strategy and dedicate the remainder of the summer to updating your content library.
Paid ads, email campaigns, blog posts, and social media messages are essential to have in your content arsenal for the 2021 holiday season. Take advantage of the time you have now by updating existing marketing collateral (e.g., articles, case studies, whitepapers, shopping guides). If you have a smaller marketing team with limited resources, starting a blog can be an efficient way to build out your company’s content library.
Depending on your target audience, you may also consider branching out to newer lead-generation tactics like text message or SMS marketing. Automated SMS marketing is a cost-effective solution for engaging your customers with personalized messages that create a sense of urgency.
Accurate product descriptions and specifications are always influential to the customer decision-making process. But just including general product descriptions or overviews of services throughout your company’s online store limits your ability to create a connection with shoppers.
The buyer decision-making process has always been driven by emotion. Customers who purchased from your business in the past were ultimately made to feel that your product or service would meet their needs. Consequently, messaging that inspires confidence in a customer will create that coveted emotional connection that moves them to buy.
Use your in-depth product knowledge to create website messaging and pieces of content that reinforce to buyers that what you’re selling will lead to their desired outcome, such as alleviating a pain point or delivering joy. To help take your company’s messaging one step further, consider weaving verified customer reviews throughout your marketing content and product pages.
The holiday season can be the busiest time of year for an ecommerce retailer. But remember: to customers, it’s an exciting, meaningful occasion. As you prepare to deploy your holiday marketing strategy, don’t overlook the advantage that comes with connecting your brand to the spirit of the season. Promotional strategies like upselling special items or gift cards at checkout, seasonal packaging, and holiday-themed messaging on your website are fun, straightforward ways to delight your customers.
Giving back is an integral part of the holiday season, so consider partnering with a charitable organization this year. Consumers are four times more likely to purchase from a company they see as having a strong purpose, a 2020 global survey conducted by Zeno Group revealed. Working with a nonprofit is a great way to support a worthy cause while also signaling to values-based customers that your business is committed to having a broader societal impact.
Here are some ways to engage customers with your charitable initiatives during the holidays:
Your employees are the engines that drive every aspect of your holiday shopping experience and will ultimately help you achieve your goals for the season. But to ensure success, you need to empower your staff with the necessary tools to execute your strategy.
From fulfillment to customer support, the summer is ideal for prepping employees for the holiday rush. Dedicate time and resources to work with employees on the following areas.
Before employees can successfully execute your strategy for the holiday shopping season, you need to define and regularly communicate objectives for each of your departments. By reinforcing holiday goals with senior leaders, managers, and staff, you’ll ensure each team member remains committed to providing an exceptional customer experience throughout the busy months ahead.
Keep in mind that the holidays are also a special time of year for your employees — just like your customers. To help drive home your objectives, incorporate holiday-themed incentives, like gift cards or prize giveaways tied to company performance and customer satisfaction.
Many retailers reported a significant surge in customer service inquiries during the 2020 holiday shopping season. Of course, the effectiveness of your customer support team can always mean the difference between an exceptional or an average customer experience. But during the holidays, higher-than-normal numbers of support inquiries pose a significant stress test for your customer service representatives.
Most online shoppers feel either knowledgeable representatives or a satisfactory resolution is the most important element of an excellent support interaction, according to a recent survey of customer support preferences conducted by Bizrate Insights. With this in mind, you must empower your support staff with the tools and knowledge to quickly resolve customer concerns.
More than half of all respondents to Bizrate Insights’ survey indicated either shipment updates or package returns were their top reason for contacting support. Considering this, take time during the summer to train your support team in anticipation of high volumes of customer service inquiries related to the fulfillment process.
Providing the best holiday shopping experience for customers should be your primary goal. However, your time and resources are going to be stretched thin once the holidays are in full swing. Omnichannel voice-of-customer (VoC) feedback solutions powered by Bizrate Insights are easy to implement and help you keep track of your company’s performance.
By collecting real-time customer feedback from the point of sale to post-fulfillment, our solutions help you identify and address customer concerns as they come up. And with unlimited surveys and full access to customer data standard in each subscription tier, you’ll be able to come away with a better understanding of how you can improve your business’ strategy for the next holiday shopping season.
Take some of the pressure off yourself this holiday season. Contact our team today to learn how you can get your company’s first survey up and running in minutes.
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