How To Create a Holiday Ecommerce Strategy in 2025

For online stores, the holiday period is an opportunity to break your records and make a significant share of the year’s revenue in a few short months. 

Last year, Shopify merchants drove a record-high $11.5 billion in sales over the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) period alone—a 24% increase on the year prior. Over 76 million consumers worldwide bought from Shopify-powered brands, and more than 67,000 merchants had their highest-selling day on record. 

While Black Friday may mark the beginning of the shopping season for many holiday shoppers, ecommerce business owners know the starting line for planning comes much, much sooner. The time to strategize for the holidays is in the months leading up—once Thanksgiving hits, it’s all about execution.

From defining your holiday marketing strategy to stress-testing your existing workflows, here are 11 things to check off your list to ensure you’re ready for the 2025 holiday shopping season.

1. Start gathering customer data now

Studies estimate that 74% of online shoppers expect some form of personalization when they’re shopping online. With so many retailers vying for their attention during the holiday season, it’s not enough just to meet those expectations—you need to exceed them. 

Customer data helps you go beyond addressing a customer by their first name in a marketing email. When you know who your customers are, what makes them tick, and why they’re shopping, you can craft a holiday ecommerce strategy that stands out from competitors who don’t. Start collecting valuable data now to be better prepared when that time comes. 

To gather customer data:

• Track customer behavior. Use Shopify’s pixel manager to track events like page views, add-to-carts, and purchases. Encourage people to create their own account when they visit your store to help you gather extra information—like products they’ve added to their wishlist or favorited. 
• Use incentives. Half of consumers are willing to share their data in exchange for better experiences. Use Shopify Forms to offer promotions (like 10% off a customer’s first order) and quiz-builders like OctaneAI to deliver personalized product recommendations in exchange for customer data. 
• Establish data compliance. It’s not enough to simply collect data—an estimated three-quarters of the global population are protected by privacy laws. Ensure you’re compliant with these regulations by building a data inventory, developing a data-protection policy, and conducting regular risk assessments. 

From your customer feedback surveys to your order-management systems, every piece of data you have should feed back to a unified customer profile. 

If you’re operating your business on Shopify, you already have a robust customer data platform as standard. Every interaction you have with a customer—be that online or offline, through native Shopify features or integrated apps—feeds back to their unified customer profile for a 360-degree view of your customers, ready for you to leverage as you head into the holiday season. 

2. Review last year’s holiday season data

Holiday marketing strategies are about taking stock of the previous year’s successes to optimize for the upcoming holiday season. 

Looking at last year’s metrics, you might find spreading your marketing efforts across multiple marketing channels helped you better reach your target audience. Or, you might find that Instagram was your best-performing channel, so this year you’ll hire influencers for social media campaigns.

Similarly, customer feedback surveys might show that product return rates were high in January because shoppers got several of the same product as a gift. Use this insight to your advantage this year: perhaps you offer exchanges or store credit instead of a cash refund after the holiday season comes to a close. This helps you retain revenue and encourage product discovery—customers who are loyal to one particular product might be more open to trying another one if they have a gift card to redeem. 

💡Tip: Shopify Analytics collates data from everywhere you sell, giving you the full picture of performance during the holiday season. It has over 60 prebuilt reports to choose from, with the option to create custom dashboards with your most important metrics and data visualization tools to extract insights faster. 

3. Build your 2025 holiday calendar

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the two busiest shopping days of the year, but they’re not the only dates when customers are prepared to part with their money. 

Major holidays to add to your 2025 holiday calendar include:

• November 11: Single’s Day
• November 27: Thanksgiving
• November 28: Black Friday
• November 29: Small Business Saturday
• December 1: Cyber Monday
• December 8: Green Monday
• December 21: Super Saturday
• December 24: Christmas Eve 
• December 26: Boxing Day

If you’re running a newsworthy holiday promotion or selling a product that would be a great fit for a holiday round-up or gift guide, send out press releases as soon as you have the details ironed out. 

Similarly, for any promotions that you’re running, determine shipping deadlines and cut-off dates. Examine how long it takes for an order to be fulfilled—accounting for any holiday shipping delays you might encounter—to keep customers satisfied. 

4. Schedule holiday marketing campaigns 

Consumers are ready and waiting to hear about holiday deals. Tailor your outreach to first-party data you’ve already collected to cater to the 50% of consumers who think personalized offers and promotions from brands they’ve interacted with improve their shopping experience.

The key to personalization at scale is two-fold: data collection and segmentation. Shopify handles both. You can create custom segments based on first-party customer data assembled in unified customer profiles, then reach out to them with an automated holiday marketing campaign—be that through email or SMS marketing, social media, or SEO.

Let’s put this into practice and say you’re a sporting goods brand with a segment of customers who meet these criteria: 

• Made three or more purchases
• Loyal to your “Golfing” product category 
• Live within a 10-mile radius of your Chicago store 

This segment might get early access to your Black Friday sale as a thank you for their loyalty. They could also get a personalized offer—like 25% off bestselling golf products they haven’t yet bought, with free in-store pickup at your Chicago store. 

Now’s also a great time to experiment with innovative marketing channels, as customer acquisition costs skyrocket during peak shopping periods. Footwear brand OluKai, for example, faced increasing costs for ad impressions and customer acquisition. They wanted to find a new channel that could drive brand awareness and attract new customers in a cost-effective way. So, they turned to Shop Campaigns. 

Shop Campaigns allowed OluKai to configure new targeted campaigns in minutes to quickly test performance and reach over 150 million Shop users. Plus, per-conversion pricing helped the brand acquire new customers throughout the competitive holiday season. The result? OluKai attracted 1,400 new customers at a lower CPA than other channels in their advertising mix, all while increasing AOV by 12%. 

💡Tip: Instead of staying up until midnight the day before a peak shopping day, use Launchpad to schedule changes to your storefront. Any new products, graphics, and coupon codes become active at the time you specify.

5. Make sure inventory is in stock

The last thing you want is to run out of inventory when an influx of new customers rushes to buy it. Stockouts can occur for many reasons: perhaps a supplier is late on their shipment, or a TikTok video went viral and you didn’t have enough in stock to meet demand. Either way, stockouts are damaging to ecommerce retailers—many shoppers will find the same product from a competitor if it’s unavailable to buy through your store. 

Ways to mitigate risk and ensure stock availability ahead of the holiday season include:

• Diversifying suppliers: Labor shortages and an influx of orders mean most shipping carriers experience delays during the busy holiday season. Diversify your suppliers so that if one is unable to supply inventory, you still have a backup plan. 
• Automating replenishment: Inventory forecasting tools can combine previous holiday season data with market trends to help calculate safety stock levels. Use automated inventory-management systems like Stocky to send purchase orders to the relevant vendor when inventory falls below these quantities. 
• Sourcing extra funding: If you don’t have enough cash flow to support larger-than-usual purchase orders with suppliers, consider securing additional funding. Pashion Footwear, for example, used Shopify Capital to airship their BFCM inventory instead of relying on slow water shipping.

“I'm not confident we would have been able to bring in our holiday shipment [without Shopify Capital],” says Pashion’s CEO and founder Haley Pavone. “Capital was vital in getting us the holiday inventory on hand that we needed to support that 375% sales growth. I don’t think we would have seen anything close to that growth figure without it.”

6. Stress-test the order fulfillment process

If you’re usually processing 10,000 orders but expect 50,000 during the holiday season, do you have the resources to fulfill them on time and meet customers’ delivery expectations? If not, and you don’t want to hire seasonal staff to scale output, consider outsourcing to a third-party logistics (3PL) partner.

Even if you do have the resources to scale fulfillment in-house, an influx of holiday orders can put pressure on even the most optimized workflows. Document your existing order fulfillment process to understand its limitations. Stress-test the operation and optimize each step of the order fulfillment process, whether that’s:

• Bulk-printing shipping labels with Shopify Shipping
• Rearranging your warehouse to stock popular holiday products closer to packing stations 
• Using warehouse automation tools—such as picking robots or automated guided vehicles—to quickly retrieve and sort inventory 
• Implementing a smart order-routing system to divert orders to a customer’s closest fulfillment center

💡Tip: Shopify Fulfillment Network connects your store with Flexport, a leading logistics company, to take the stress out of holiday fulfillment. Ship your inventory to a Flexport warehouse and have its team pick, pack, and ship orders directly to your customers. 

7. Create holiday gift options

Creating your own gift guides or gift-related content is a great way to include key search terms on your site to ensure it’s easy to find, and to drive sales. Online search remains the most popular way consumers find gifts, so refine your ecommerce SEO strategy and Google Ads keywords to reflect holiday-themed searches like “best gifts for moms” or “best [insert product here] of 2025.” 

Amid the holiday rush, many consumers want an easy gifting idea that feels thoughtfully curated—without having to curate it themselves. This is where product bundles shine. If you sell skincare products, for example, offer a full face routine as a complete set. Since buyers are motivated by deals during the holidays, offering the bundle at a slightly lower price than the sum of all the individual components makes for an easy, significant purchase.

For buyers who prefer to give the gift of choice, gift cards are a strong option. Display them in a prominent location on your homepage and as an easy add-on at checkout.

You could even take a leaf from Gymshark’s book and encourage people to get “Black Friday ready” by creating their own wishlist. The added benefit is that more shoppers create online accounts—in the process, sharing first-party customer data that you can use for future personalization. 

8. Improve website performance

The experience a holiday shopper has on your website can determine whether they decide to stick around and make a purchase or leave due to a laggy user experience. The challenge is, website performance tends to decline as your site scales. New plugins and custom themes might look great to customers, but cause delays in page load times that ultimately hinder the user experience. 

Before the holiday season arrives, do a comprehensive website performance audit that evaluates your:

• Page load times: Use web performance monitoring tools like Site Speed to get personalized recommendations on how to improve page load times. Shopify merchants already have an advantage here: Shopify has the fastest server speed in commerce—up to 3.9x faster than competitors. 
• Responsiveness: More than half of all holiday sales take place through a smartphone. Ensure your site is fully responsive on mobile devices. Fonts, layouts, and navigation should make mobile shopping seamless.
• Bandwidth and capacity: Does your ecommerce platform have the infrastructure to support website traffic surges? Shopify operates a global network of servers for this purpose. “Black Friday can be nerve-wracking,” says Stefan Lewis, chief digital officer at Represent. “But Shopify has always helped us in terms of increasing bandwidth, and we’ve never run into any issues around site speed.” 

If you’re concerned about your existing infrastructure being incapable of handling surges in holiday traffic, consider replatforming. Sportswear retailer Stadium Goods, for example, experienced technical difficulties with their previous ecommerce platform. It was difficult to scale, site speeds were slow, and high maintenance costs contributed to innovation deficit. 

Stadium Goods needed a modern, scalable platform capable of serving thousands of holiday shoppers with an optimized website—so they turned to Shopify. Since replatforming, they’ve experienced a 36% year-over-year increase in conversion during Black Friday Cyber Monday, with an 80% increase in conversion rates year-round.

9. Optimize the customer experience

It’s not just the website experience that needs to be seamless—the entire experience a holiday shopper has with your ecommerce brand can influence their likelihood of buying. 

Kurt Elster, founder of Shopify Plus Partner agency EtherCycle, recommends placing test orders on multiple devices to pinpoint friction in the customer journey. “As a web developer or a Shopify merchant, the chances are you probably have a decent phone, an updated laptop,” he says. “That's not what I want. I want the iPad grandma's using. When you can successfully make a purchase, we can be confident that it's going to work for everybody else.”

Simple ways to improve the holiday shopping experience include: 

• Offer free shipping: Free shipping during the holidays is expected for those shopping online, but features like shipping insurance—to protect against porch pirates and damage—can show customers you’re looking out for them. Customer satisfaction leads to coveted word-of-mouth referrals, so every bit of delight counts.
• Invite high-value customers to your loyalty program: Give your most loyal customers a show of appreciation with special holiday discount codes, gift subscriptions, and early access to new products. This can incentivize repeat purchases and reduce the pressure to acquire new shoppers during a competitive holiday season.
• Build personalized shopping experiences: Use what you’ve learned about your customers to tailor every interaction, whether that’s a personalized email or customized storefront. For example, you could upsell and cross-sell items similar to products they’ve bought previously to increase average order value. 
• Support omnichannel shopping: If you have a brick-and-mortar store, allow online shoppers to buy online and pick up in-store. It can simplify fulfillment on your end and create an opportunity for them to experience your brand in person.
• Optimize the checkout flow: To minimize interruptions to online purchases, enable guest or one-click checkout, offer multiple payment options, and ensure return and exchange details are easy to find and hassle-free. 

World of Books decided to migrate to Shopify and test whether the new optimized architecture impacted conversion rates. “Really what we were desperately hoping for in replatforming to Shopify was to take advantage of Shop Pay as an accelerated wallet," says product director David Magee. "We thought that would deliver a really engaging customer experience and that it would yield good returns from a conversion-rate perspective.”

David set up an A/B test in which 50% of customers went to the legacy website, and the other half adopted the new Shopify-powered website. His hypothesis proved true: World of Books’ Shopify store saw a 10% improvement in conversion rate relative to the legacy tech stack, so they did a full rollout. That BFCM weekend, they saw an 18% increase in conversions and broke seven all-time sales volume records.

10. Prepare your customer service team

More shoppers equals more support tickets that can easily flood an already stretched customer service team. To get ahead of the shopping rush, prioritize customer service in your upcoming holiday season prep to meet or exceed customer expectations.

Here’s what that looks like in practice: 

• Give your customer service team a refresher on common questions around shipping windows and return policies.
• Develop a playbook for managing frustrated customers.
• Ensure everyone is well-versed in after-sales services to leave a positive brand impression.
• Prepare a knowledge base that educates holiday shoppers on how to use their new products, and link to relevant documentation in your post-purchase emails. 
• Consider hiring seasonal help if you anticipate being overstretched. 

💡Tip: Use Shopify Inbox to add a live-chat feature to your online store. Then, use Shopify Magic to get AI-generated answers to repetitive questions, like “What’s your holiday shipping cut-off?” or “Do you ship to [country]?”

11. Brace for an influx of returns

January is often referred to as “Returnuary” for a reason. Many customers who’ve bought new products during the holiday sale wind up returning them—so much so, the National Retail Federation estimates that 17% of all merchandise bought during the holiday season will ultimately be returned.

This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that many retailers extend their returns policies during the holiday season. If customers purchase a Christmas gift during BFCM weekend, for example, an extended 30-day returns window lets them return it if the recipient doesn’t want it. 

That said, there are steps you can take to minimize the damaging effect of holiday returns:

• Offer refund alternatives: Instead of losing revenue through cash refunds for returned holiday goods, offer exchanges or store credit by default. 
• Charge for returns: Free returns aren’t free—they cost retailers time and money to process them. If you’re experiencing a high volume of holiday returns, consider shifting the cost to your customers. Be sure to weigh up the impact of this on customer experience beforehand. 
• Protect against return fraud: Opportunists jump on the busy season by attempting fraudulent returns that go under a retailer’s radar. Require proof of purchase (e.g., a receipt) for every return, and use fraud detection tools like Shopify Protect to flag suspicious holiday orders before you fulfill them.