Top 3 Tips to prepare for the Holiday Selling Season

The Holiday Selling Season is ahead of us, and we are excited to help you turbocharge your sales with QuickBooks Commerce during this period.

We know that the anticipation for the upcoming Holiday Selling Season is immense. To ensure you have an incredible selling experience, we have made several improvements to QuickBooks Commerce. From massively increasing our data store infrastructure to optimizations to our stock level calculations and database load and many others!

Unfortunately, there are certain areas and operations in QuickBooks Commerce that we cannot control - such as limitations imposed by 3rd party channels. As an example, we are bound to certain API rate limits from other sales channels (i.e., Shopify / Amazon). If certain operations trigger extensive updates via API, you may experience a delay and slowdown of the system.

And while we have put in place a reliable support process should you encounter any issues; the best path is always prevention. Luckily, most of these issues can be avoided to ensure you have a smooth selling experience with us.

☝🏽Here are our top three recommendations to follow:

1Avoid Running Bulk Updates to your Inventory

During your peak selling period (e.g., Black Friday/Cyber Monday) - from 23 November to 6 December - please refrain from:

• Conducting any bulk updates inside the app, such as extensive .CSV updates to your products/variants or making bulk stock adjustments (>100 line items).
• Changing the default stock location for a sales channel will trigger a complete stock re-sync for all linked products.
• Changing the default price list of a sales channel. If you intend to discount a few products during the peak period, we recommend changing the respective product price instead of updating the whole channel's price list.
  

If you plan to make extensive updates to your products or inventory, please discuss with your Account Manager at success@tradegecko.com to review best practices before the holiday selling period.

2Increase Capacity

Increase the capacity of your WooCommerce and Magento hosting instance

If you are selling on WooCommerce and/or Magento, we advise you to consult with your hosting provider to increase the capacity of your hosting instance based on your expected sales volume during the holiday season period. As a rule of thumb, if you expect sales to double, we also recommend you double the capacity of your hosting instance.

3Dedicated Stock Levels and Locations

i. Setup up a 'Safety Stock' margin

If you have multiple high-volume sales channels and are worried about overselling, we recommend you to dedicate some safety stock when finalizing your stock level before the holiday selling period. For example, you could update QuickBooks Commerce with 90% of your stock value and keep 10% of products as safety stock.

ii. Separate locations for each of your sales channel

Let's say you share warehouses/locations in QuickBooks Commerce between multiple sales channels you expect high sales volume from (for example, Shopify + Amazon).

We recommend you split these into separate locations - one location for each channel, with a dedicated stock level for each channel - during the peak selling period. This reduces the risk of stock level disruptions, and, if necessary, you have full control to move stock between locations for products that are selling faster on other channels.

Our QuickBooks Commerce team is dedicated to supporting you through the holiday season, and we are excited to see you have a smooth selling experience.