Top 5 Tips to prepare for the Holiday Selling Season

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

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, we cannot control certain areas and operations in QuickBooks Commerce, such as limitations imposed by 3rd party channels. For 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's our top five 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 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 who will advise you on best practices.

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. 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 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 complete control to move stock between locations for products that are selling faster on other channels.

4Flash Sales

Please expect a delay in the sync of stock levels and prices which could potentially cause overselling during flash sales. Well, hey, you know what they say the best formula is: Great merchandise + Big discounts =⚡️💰 We recommend that you speak with one of our team members to discuss best practices for the peak selling season. 

5Error Diagnostics

To minimize potential issues with Order imports to Quickbooks Commerce and information up-to-date, we recommend reviewing the Diagnostics tabs for each Sales Channel that you currently have connected. Subsequently, following the steps to solve errors displayed onscreen will reduce the potential for issues during peak selling.

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.