Before the holiday rush, check the back of the house

This time of year, most small businesses put their energy into the holiday promotion. The sale gets planned and the emails go out. Then the orders show up, and the parts nobody looked at start to give.

I spent years running operations for a direct-to-consumer business where more than 95% of sales came through the website. Marketing mattered, but the weeks that decided our year usually came down to whether we could ship what we sold, on time, without running the team into the ground.

Here's what's worth checking now, while there's still time to fix it.

Inventory

Do you know what's actually on the shelf, and what your best sellers will need through December? A promotion that sells out on day two isn't much of a win if half those orders end up backordered.

If you're sizing holiday orders off last year's sales report, check whether those items were out of stock for part of it. A report only counts the days you had something to sell, so it tends to undercount the items you can least afford to run out of.

Shipping cutoffs

Pick your last guaranteed delivery date, put it on your site, and stick to it. People will work around a deadline they knew about. A gift that arrives on December 27 is a different conversation.

Put the date somewhere customers will actually see it, like the homepage banner and next to the checkout button, rather than on a shipping policy page nobody opens.

Want a second set of eyes? I can walk through your store and your fulfillment setup before the rush and tell you where it's likely to give. Let’s talk →

Your website on a busy day

Place a test order from your phone and make sure the discount code works at checkout. Then check that the confirmation email actually arrives. Ten minutes now beats finding out from an annoyed customer.

If you've added apps or plugins since last year, test with those running. A new pop-up or upsell widget can slow a mobile checkout more than you'd expect.

Coverage

If one person handles packing and customer emails, figure out today what happens if they're out sick the second week of December. Write down where things are and how they get done, and make sure someone else has tried it at least once.

Before the end of the week

None of these take long on their own. Pull your top sellers and their stock, pick a cutoff date and get it on the site, place one test order, and have the coverage conversation. If any of them turns up a problem, you still have a few weeks to fix it before the orders start coming in.