The Store's Holiday Rehearsal in October

The last quiet month

For most online stores, October is the calm before the busiest weeks of the year. Orders are steady, staff have time, and nothing is on fire.

That makes it the last month to find out what breaks under real use. A problem discovered in mid-December gets fixed in a hurry, if it gets fixed at all, while orders keep arriving.

A rehearsal means using the store the way a customer will: buying things, on the devices customers use, to the addresses they live at, and reading every message the store sends back.

An afternoon spent now is cheaper than one bad week in December.

What usually goes wrong in December

• Sold-out items still showing as in stock.
• Shipping rates that undercharge heavy or remote orders.
• Confirmation emails landing in spam, or not sent at all.
• A checkout that fails on one kind of phone.
• Gift messages lost between the cart and the packing slip.
• Cut-off dates customers cannot find until it is too late.

The fourth is the one owners rarely catch themselves, because they test on their own phone, on the office wireless, with their details already saved. Customers arrive on other phones, over mobile data, typing everything from scratch.

Place real orders

Buy from the store with a real card, as a customer would. A test mode that skips the payment step does not test the payment step.

Place several orders: on a computer, an iPhone and an Android phone, as a new customer and a returning one, with a discount code and with a gift message.

Ship them to different addresses, including one in another province and one rural address, then refund or cancel each one. The refund, and its email, are part of the test.

Write down every step that confused you or failed. That list is October's work.

Stock that matches the shelf

Count the bestsellers and the holiday items by hand and compare the counts with the store's. Differences found now are easy to explain. Differences found in December become apologies.

Check each size, colour and variant separately, since a product can show as available while the size most people want has none.

If the same stock is sold in a shop as well, confirm that in-store sales reduce the online count, and how quickly.

Decide what happens when something sells out: hide it, mark it sold out, or offer a notice when it returns. Then make sure the store actually does that.

Shipping rates and taxes

Price a few real carts against what shipping will actually cost: one small and light, one heavy, one bulky, and one going somewhere remote.

Check that any free shipping threshold still makes sense with this year's prices and packaging.

Confirm that the tax on an order to another province is what your accountant expects, since sales tax in Canada depends on where the order is delivered.

A worked example

A sewing school runs evening and weekend classes in its studio, and through its website sells sewing kits, patterns and gift certificates for classes. December is its busiest month online.

Last year, two problems surfaced in the week before the holidays. Gift certificate emails were going to buyers' spam folders, and a new quilting kit, far heavier than the rest, was shipping at the light-parcel rate.

Both came from changes made in the autumn without a test order: a new email setting, and a product added without a weight.

This October the school placed eight real orders, read every email on three phones, weighed every kit and corrected the rates. It also found that the gift message field vanished on one phone's checkout.

The cut-off date for shipped kits now appears on the home page, the cart and the order confirmation, with gift certificates offered after it.

Every email the store sends

List them all: order confirmation, shipping notice, refund, gift certificate, account creation, password reset, and the notice that tells your staff a new order has arrived.

Read each one on a phone. Check that it arrives, shows your business name rather than a software default, lists what was ordered, and has a reply address that someone reads.

Check where it lands as well. A confirmation that goes to spam, or to the Promotions tab in Gmail, produces anxious emails asking whether the order went through.

And check who receives the staff notice. If that person is away in December, orders can sit unseen.

On a phone, on mobile data

Test the whole checkout on a phone using a cellular connection, not the office wireless, and without saved passwords or autofill.

Use an iPhone updated to iOS 11 if you can, since it arrived last month and many phones already run it. Use an older Android phone too.

Watch for buttons hidden behind the keyboard, postal code fields that reject a space, and payment pages that load slowly or not at all.

Cut-off dates, decided now

Decide the last day to order for delivery before the holidays, for each shipping method and for distant regions separately. Base it on what your shipping actually takes in December, with a margin.

Publish the dates where shoppers will see them: the home page, product pages, the cart and the order confirmation.

Decide what you offer after the cut-off: local pickup, gift certificates delivered by email, or orders that arrive in the new year. Say which, plainly.

A date after which nothing changes

Pick a date in late November after which nobody adds plugins, changes the theme or reorganises the store until January. Many of December's problems are caused by changes made in December.

Security updates are the exception. Apply them, then place one test order straight away.

The counter-case

A store whose busy season is not December, such as one selling garden supplies or summer gear, should hold its rehearsal before its own peak instead.

And a store with a handful of online orders a month can do a lighter version: two real orders, a stock count of the bestsellers, and the cut-off dates.

For anyone expecting a holiday rush, rehearse it now: order, count, weigh, read every email, test on phones, and publish the dates.

The rehearsal

1. Place real orders on three different devices.
2. Count bestsellers and holiday stock by hand.
3. Price heavy, bulky and remote carts.
4. Read every store email on a phone.
5. Refund each test order and check the email.
6. Publish cut-off dates on cart and confirmation.
7. Set a date to stop changing the store.

Step one finds most of what the others confirm. A real order on a real phone, paid with a real card, passes through stock, shipping, payment and email in a single afternoon.

The moment in a test order when the shopper leaves for the payment page is covered in payment pages that look like a different business.

Frequently asked questions

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