6 Mistakes That Trip Up Online Stores During Holiday Traffic Surges

The holidays are the most wonderful eCommerce time of the year. They also can be the most stressful if you’re not ready to deal with extra customer traffic to your online store.

Site crashes, unhappy customers, and shipping slowdowns can wreck your holiday revenue projections and thoroughly stress you out.

For a more peaceful and productive holiday sales season no matter how many customers show up, plan now to avoid these common mistakes.

Mistake #1: A hosting plan that can’t handle holiday traffic spikes

Even big retailers struggle with crashes when shoppers overwhelm their sites during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. But that doesn’t mean that crashes are inevitable, and they’re certainly not good for business.

Big companies can cope with downtime because they offer deep-discount deals that customers will check back for. But most small online sellers don’t have that kind of drawing power. If your store has an outage on a major sale day, odds are shoppers will just take their money somewhere else.