Our team has compiled the checklist below to provide some ideas on how best to prepare your IndieCommerce 2.0 site ahead of the holiday rush.
Content Creation
- Create a Site Alert with a future start date to inform customers of any important updates
- Create a new Design to be used during the holiday season.
- Unless this change should be immediate, be careful marking the new design as ‘Active’.
- Create graphics and images that can be used for the banner, CTA Blocks, image row, and other parts of the site.
- These images can be uploaded now using the Media link in the ‘Manage’ pane of your dashboard and inserted at a later date.
- Promote wishlists to customers as a way for them to track books and/or products they’re interested in.
- It may be helpful to customers to create a page outlining the steps of how to create a wishlist; we have an example here!
- Create holiday-themed gift cards and e-gift codes for customers to purchase as last-minute gifts.
- Enabled Ingram M and Ingram T products if you’re looking to offer non-book sidelines such as calendars, puzzles, games, etc. to the website
- Dashboard > Fulfillment Settings > Wholesaler Settings > Book Availability
- Plan your email marketing campaigns and send test emails ahead of time to account for any last minute changes.
- (Tier 2 only) Create dedicated holiday catalogs for specific books and products you wish to promote
- (Tier 2 only) Create Store merchandise for the holidays for customers to purchase
Checkout + Order Processing
- Create shipping methods specifically for holiday shopping.
- Leave these disabled until the store is ready to use them.
- Check the store’s Authorize.net filter settings
- (Standard warning of not marking anything in the Fraud Detection Suite as ‘Authorize and Hold for Review’)?
- Use the Promotions & Coupon feature for Holiday Promotions
- Dashboard > Commerce > Promotions & Coupons
- Go through checkout yourself as a customer (on desktop and mobile)
- Train staff for order processing. Our Friday Users Group is dedicated to order processing on the site and all store staff are welcome to attend as well! Registration is here.
Closer to the Holidays…
- Adjust the Wholesaler Settings under ‘Fulfillment Settings’
- Book Availability-these settings control which books customers can or cannot purchase.
- For stores on Tier 2 utilizing Local Store Inventory, please be aware that books in stock in the store’s LSI file are always available for purchase.
- Ingram data may not reflect publisher availability and does not always match iPage exactly. There is a chance a book will be marked unavailable but still be obtained directly from the publisher or iPage.
- Book Availability Messages-this is where you can adjust the availability language that displays based on the book’s availability status.
- Warehouse Settings-stores can enable or disable specific Ingram warehouses that their website references. Select your warehouses and either hide the others from the admin order detail page or make them unavailable entirely.
- Store Pricing by Wholesaler Category-the settings here allow stores to adjust the list price for products imported into the website based on the discount category.
- Book Availability-these settings control which books customers can or cannot purchase.
- Check and modify policy pages to update any changes and ensure they accurately reflect the store’s policies (especially the Refund Policy)
- Update Store Hours and Store Closure dates
- (Tier 2 only) If using Local Store Inventory, upload inventory frequently to have the most accurate and up to date information on your site.