The holiday season is one of the biggest opportunities for online sellers.
Generous online consumers are willing to pay for high-ticket products and gifts for their friends and families. Searching online is super convenient for those who are looking for a wide selection and something unique. With many brands pushing consumers to begin their holiday shopping increasingly earlier, this gives dropshippers an opportunity to make everyday count during the holiday season.
So how can you prepare your dropshipping store for the holiday season 2024?
In this article, we are going to give you the definitive answer, with tips on prepping your dropshipping store, e-commerce holiday planning, and much more!
But first, let’s start with the takeaway answer, so your E-commerce store is the go-to place for customers’ holiday gift lists!
How do you prepare a dropshipping store for the holiday season 2024? Dropshippers can make sure they are prepared for the holiday season 2024, it’s important to prepare early, use a reliable supplier, prepare your website fully, set promotions up before, throughout, and after the holiday season, increase your advertising budget and reach out to existing customers.
Ok, so now you’ve got the brief answer in order to get started on your planning straight away, in order for us to fully understand the best practices for dropshipping during the 2024 holiday season, let’s start by taking a look at some background on why you need to get prepared right away!
Why prepare my dropshipping store early for the holiday season?
Some dropshippers and other retailers may have started their holiday planning as early as January 2024!
This is not only true for gift-related vertical markets, such as toys, fine wines, perfumes & fragrance, luxury goods, beauty products, and jewelry, but many supermarkets start stockpiling alcohol from September to ensure they have sufficient for Christmas.
According to the Centre for Retail Research indicates that spending around the holiday period cash terms has risen every year for the last nine years.
It doesn’t take much imagination to work out that dropshippers who are properly preparing for holiday season 2024 will look to pick up their portion of this lucrative business.
Let’s look below at some more convincing stats as to the value of that holiday planning.
“spending around the holiday period cash terms have risen every year for the last nine years.”
High season 2019
Last year online holiday sales during Thanksgiving in the US amounted to a massive $4.2 billion, with an additional $9.42 billion being spent in e-commerce and dropshipping stores during Cyber Monday.
If that hasn’t got you reaching for your planning notebook, maybe an article in Salesforce which estimated total global holiday sales dated between November 1st to December 31st at a mind-blowing $723 billion will!
According to the same study, holiday season 2019 had many brands persuading e-commerce customers to get their gift lists ticked off ASAP!
“Last year online high season sales during Thanksgiving in the US amounted to a massive $4.2 billion,”
November discounts
E-commerce brands, including dropshipping stores, were pushing out an average discount rate of around 23 percent on November 25th, which gained traction throughout that week.
The final encouragement for holiday shoppers to buy ended, with a 30 percent average discount rate on Cyber Monday.
Dropshippers get ahead
So It’s crucial for those running dropshipping stores to make sure you get ahead early. By leaving your discounts or promotions until later on in the holiday season, you will risk competitors taking your share of the bounty!
By making sure you start your dropshipping store prep the earliest possible, it will also give you an edge with the late shoppers too. So now you can see how important it is to start your high season dropshipping plan for 2024, early as possible, you might be wondering what you need to do?
Let’s find out.
“it’s crucial that you work with reliable suppliers.”
E-commerce holiday planning
Ok so now we are reaching for our planners as we speak, don’t forget it’s crucial to understand that the keyword for successful holiday season dropshipping is planning ahead.
Although the e-commerce world loves to focus on Black Friday because the huge spikes in sales are so attractive, the smartest dropshipping store owners know that December is the month that can make a lasting difference to your profit.
Let’s take a look below at steps you can take to ensure your dropshipping store is ready for the holiday season 2024.
“the keyword for successful holiday season dropshipping is planning ahead.”
Set promotion plans and advertisement calendar early
Starting with your promotions as early as you can mean you will be ready for any early pushes. Work on any discounts you are offering and make sure you physically add them to your calendar to prompt you.
Robust website
There’s nothing worse than having your website repeatedly crash during the high season. So it’s critical to iron out any issues you may have to ensure a robust platform for your holiday customers.
It’s also not a great idea to make any large scale changes to your website during this busy period.
Promote throughout the season
As we’ve seen above there are opportunities for dropshippers after the big event, such as Christmas Day itself, so maximize on all opportunities by setting promotions to roll throughout the holiday season.
Reach out to existing customers
Rather than using budgets and precious time to actively seek out new customers, don’t forget to take the best advantage of your current customers who are statistically 60 to 70 percent more likely to buy from you again.
Increase advertising budgets
Make sure your advertising spend is high enough to reap the most rewards over the holiday season 2024.
It may be that your monthly budgets could be tweaked, for example, August (historically a slower month for sales) could provide some of the extra budgets for a larger spend over the holiday period.
Your holiday season budget should be thought about well in advance.
Make sure to hire a fast fulfillment and shipping agency
It goes without saying that in order to maximize fully on the potential holiday period sales, it’s crucial to work with a dropshipping agency that is able to ship your goods at speed. During the holiday period, many customers are buying at the last minute and the expectation is delivery before the big day.
Delivery dates can be somewhat of an obsession to those not wanting to let their friends and family down with a late gift!
No matter whether you spend all year reaching out to customers, planning sales, etc., if your dropshipping agency isn’t able to service your customers, you could be heading for problems.
It’s crucial to work with a shipping agency that‘s able to ship your goods at speed.”
Stock inventory where you can
It’s also worth stocking inventory at this time too. So you are ahead of the curve and can deliver more quickly to your holiday shoppers. It is critical for dropshippers as many else might sell similar products; holding a stock can effectively prevent out-of-stock situations and ensure faster order processing.
And finally…
So to wrap up, it’s worth remembering that one of the most important aspects of dropshipping is giving exceptional customer service and making sure you keep your customers in the loop with any order updates.
By working with HyperSKU, dropshippers’s backend operations are in safe hands. HyperSKU provides best-automated order fulfillment system with express shipping and quality products, on top of that dropshippers can stock inventory and customize packaging too.
This way you will have happy customers, happy to shop with you well into 2024 and beyond!
Nicola Holder 