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To get the most out of the holiday shopping season—or any sales period—it’s important to make sure your online store is set up to sell, ship, and fulfill all of your orders seamlessly. Optimizing your ecommerce store before the holiday rush will help you run your business efficiently, even at the busiest times of year. Follow these tips to make sure your online store is ready to handle payments, shipping, and holiday delivery deadlines.
For more tips, check out our complete Holiday Selling Guide.
1. Set up payment tools
It’s always best to make it as intuitive as possible for your customers to navigate your store, especially at checkout. Be sure to design a checkout page that matches the overall aesthetic of your site and makes paying feel easy and quick.
Your store can integrate with online payment processors or partners that let customers pay for a purchase in installments. You can also set up in-person sales with a mobile credit card reader.
Sales tax laws vary from state to state, but you can take the headache out of knowing how much to collect by adding a tax-collection tool to your website. For example, you can add tax tools to a Squarespace store that automatically calculate how much sales tax to charge on a purchase.
Automatic tax calculation is free for Squarespace users on Commerce plans selling in the United States, and for an additional fee you can use the service to file returns and make tax payments on your behalf.
Sellers based outside of the United States (or sellers with customers outside the U.S.) can set up manual tax rates for various countries and Canadian provinces. And for your customers’ convenience, you can choose to have the sales tax included in your prices by using tax-inclusive pricing.
2. Simplify your shipping process
When it comes to holiday shipping and getting your goods into your customers’ hands, you can choose from a wide range of options—just find the one that works best for your business.
You can charge a flat rate that applies to any order, regardless of the number of packages. That’ll appeal to customers, who value clear and simple costs. Or, you can choose to charge different shipping fees based on how much your products weigh.
Streamline shipping with Squarespace
To help you ship quickly, Squarespace auto-populates customer addresses and tracking numbers directly on your Commerce dashboard, creating a seamless order fulfillment process.
If you want some help finding the best shipping rates for all of your products, Squarespace has options.
Buy and print UPS® shipping labels and USPS shipping labels directly through Squarespace. The option is built into U.S. Business and Commerce plans and may cost less than what you’d pay with a carrier.
Compare rates with shipping extensions. Squarespace offers extensions that help you compare rates from different mail carriers, so you can get the best deals at the moment. You can use Squarespace shipping labels with the extensions you choose.
Extensions can save you time on processing your orders, printing shipping labels, sending ship notifications, and coordinating package pick-up with mail carriers.
3. Encourage in-person local pickup
Another option is to offer in-person local pickup or hand delivery. This option is helpful in many situations.
If you sell perishable goods, they’ll stay fresher with local pickup than they might if shipped.
Customers who need their purchase by a specific date can simply pick it up on time instead of relying on a shipping carrier.
Customers can save on shipping costs if it’s more convenient for them to pick up their purchase locally.
To help customers find your store’s physical location, use Squarespace’s Location Management feature, which will make sure the correct address, contact information, and hours appear when customers search for your store’s location online.
Keeping this information up to date and accurate can also improve your search ranking when people browse for businesses near them. Consider adding store contact information and a contact form to your website too.
4. Know your shipping deadlines
Recently, many retailers and carriers have noted that shipping may face delays during the holidays. Help your customers plan their purchases by clearly communicating ordering deadlines and shipping cut-offs. Your exact deadline will depend on your mail carrier and location.
To manage expectations, add an announcement bar that states the ordering deadline for guaranteed delivery by a certain date. You can also use the opportunity to reach out to customers by email to share both shipping deadlines and any holiday promotions.
Learn how to write a shipping policy for your business
5. Track where you can ship which products
Plenty of wineries and breweries have booming online sales. But these businesses also need to understand complex laws that control where you can legally ship alcohol. Since no one wants to get in trouble or have to send an apologetic email after a customer makes a purchase you can’t fulfill, create shipping zones for your store. That way, as soon as a customer enters a shipping address, you can tell them whether you can ship the product to their area.
There’s a lot to keep track of during this time of year, from the locations you can serve to which company you want to handle your packages. Planning ahead can stop you from feeling overwhelmed, so make a list if that will help, and get your payment, tax, and shipping selections taken care of as soon as you can.
6. Set up fulfillment profiles for products
Once you’ve chosen your fulfillment options and shipping locations, set up shipping rules for specific products using fulfillment profiles. Fulfillment profiles give Squarespace sellers a way to set custom fulfillment options for individual products. That means you can set a product as available for shipping only or pickup only. You can set country availability and flat shipping fees for individual products too.
For example, a bakery may want the option to ship or offer pickup for cookies and baking mixes, but restrict cake purchases to in-person pickup only. The owner can customize the products so that customers know what’s available to purchase in their location and how they’ll receive their order. When a customer checks out, their order will be separated by delivery method.
Now that you’ve optimized your online store for the holiday season, it’s time to create your holiday marketing plan.
This post was updated on September 15, 2023.