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To get the most out of the holiday shopping season—or any sales period—it’s important to make sure your online store is set up to fulfill all of your orders seamlessly. Optimizing your ecommerce store’s payment and delivery options will help you run your business efficiently, even at the busiest times of year. That’ll protect you and your customers from frustrating errors or confusion and save you time keeping track of your orders.
For more tips, check out our complete Holiday Selling Guide.
1. Set up payment tools
It’s always best to make it as intuitive as possible for your customers to navigate your store, especially at checkout. Be sure to design a checkout page that matches the overall aesthetic of your site. Consistency and quality signals legitimacy, which is especially important when you’re selling to people who are brand new to your store. Your checkout flow should make paying feel easy and quick.
Connect your store with payment tools that offer your customers flexibility, like multiple payment methods and partners that let customers pay for a purchase in installments. You can also set up in-person sales with a mobile credit card reader. Letting customers choose payment options they’re familiar and comfortable with increases their trust in you and can help you make a sale.
In the U.S., sales tax laws vary from state to state, but you can take the headache out of knowing how much to collect by adding a tax-collection tool to your website. For example, you can add tax tools to a U.S. Squarespace store that automatically calculate how much sales tax to charge on a purchase.
Businesses based outside of the United States (or sellers with customers outside the U.S.) can set up manual tax rates for various countries and Canadian provinces. And for your customers’ convenience, you can choose to have the sales tax included in your prices by using tax-inclusive pricing.
2. Simplify your shipping process
When it comes to holiday shipping and getting products into your customers’ hands, you can choose from a wide range of options—just find the one that works best for your business.
First, consider how much time you currently spend packing and shipping orders. Do you need to make changes to how much time you spend on packing and shipping or when you do it to accommodate high holiday sales? If you work with a 3PL to fulfill orders, is there anything you need to update with them before the holidays, like a seasonal addition to your packaging?
Next, consider shipping rates. A recent survey by Discover Global Network found that 65% of people surveyed consider free shipping very or extremely important, and more important overall than fast shipping. That makes sense, since shoppers start buying gifts early to get ahead of shipping delays.
Consider building shipping costs into your pricing so customers aren’t surprised by the extra charge at checkout. If you can’t afford to offer free shipping, try offering it on purchases over a certain amount or charge a flat shipping rate that applies to any order, regardless of the number of packages. That’ll appeal to customers, who value clear and simple costs.
Streamline shipping with Squarespace
To help you ship quickly, Squarespace auto-populates customer addresses and tracking numbers directly on your account dashboard, creating a seamless order fulfillment process.
If you want some help finding the best shipping options for all of your products, Squarespace has options.
Buy and print UPS® shipping labels and USPS shipping labels. You can do this directly through Squarespace. The option is built into some Business and Commerce plans and may cost less than what you’d pay with a carrier.
Compare rates with shipping extensions. Squarespace offers plugins that help you compare rates from different mail carriers, so you can get the best deals at the moment. You can use Squarespace shipping labels with the extensions you choose.
Get inventory or returns support. Hand the shipping logistics off to a third-party provider or get help managing any return requests. You can connect to extensions partners that sync directly with your Squarespace account.
3. Encourage in-person local pickup
Another option is to offer in-person local pickup or hand delivery. This option is helpful in many situations.
If you sell perishable goods, they’ll stay fresher with local pickup than they might if shipped.
Customers who need their purchase by a specific date can simply pick it up on time instead of relying on a shipping carrier.
Customers can save on shipping costs if it’s more convenient for them to pick up their purchase locally.
To help customers find your store’s physical location, use Squarespace’s Location Management feature, which will make sure the correct address, contact information, and hours appear when customers search for your store’s location online.
Keeping this information up to date and accurate can also improve your search ranking when people browse for businesses near them. Consider adding store contact information and a contact form to your website too.
4. Know your shipping deadlines
In recent years many businesses and shipping carriers have warned customers of shipping delays during the holidays. Make sure to check shipping deadlines for major holidays with each of the carriers you use. You can help your customers plan their purchases by clearly communicating those deadlines clearly on your website, email, and social media.
To manage expectations, add an announcement bar that states the ordering deadline for guaranteed delivery by a certain date. You can also highlight shipping deadlines in any holiday email promotions you send, which both keeps them in the loop and adds a feeling of urgency to your sales.
Learn how to write a shipping policy for your business
5. Track where you can ship which products
Plenty of wineries and breweries have booming online sales. But these businesses also need to understand complex laws that control where you can legally ship alcohol. Since no one wants to get in trouble or have to send an apologetic email after a customer makes a purchase you can’t fulfill, make sure your products won’t hit any restrictions or trigger fees where your customers live.
Once you know where you can ship, create shipping zones for your store. That way, as soon as a customer enters a shipping address, you can tell them whether you can ship the product to their area.
6. Set up fulfillment profiles for products
Once you’ve chosen your fulfillment options and shipping locations, set up fulfillment rules for specific products. That way, you can set a product as available for shipping only, pickup only, or eligible for both, plus country availability, flat shipping fees.
For example, a bakery may want the option to ship or offer pickup for cookies and baking mixes, but restrict cake purchases to in-person pickup or local delivery only. The owner can customize the products so that customers know what’s available to purchase in their location and how they’ll get their order.
On Squarespace you can set fulfillment profiles to set custom fulfillment options for individual products. When a customer checks out, they’ll see their order items separated by delivery method.
7. Stay on top of your inventory
If you’re like many business owners, you’ll sell more and in more places than usual during the holidays. That can make it hard to keep track of what’s low in stock or pricing and discounts, especially if you’re making sales in person and online.
Make sure you have a good inventory tracking tool that can track and sync your sales in real time, so you never oversell an item and disappoint a customer. If you only sell from your online store, this is relatively simple. But if you sell on social media or in person too, make sure you have a tool that tracks every sale in one place.
There’s a lot to juggle during this time of year, from the locations you can serve to which company you want to handle your packages. Planning ahead can stop you from feeling overwhelmed, so make a list for each step you want to tackle if that will help.
Once you feel set up to fulfill your orders, get some ideas to create your holiday marketing plan and attract new customers to your store.
This post was updated on October 14, 2024.