10 Holiday eCommerce Mistakes That Could Cost You Sales!

The holiday season is here, and so is the surge in purchases and sales. You will see numerous ongoing discounts and offers available both online and offline right now. It might get difficult to catch up with these trends. The sellers want to begin the season with more sales at their online store. The good thing is that you can have a great hike while people shop like crazy during the festive season, making it crucial to fix holiday eCommerce errors.

But you cannot attract sales at your store just like that. The sellers need to make the optimum utilization of their resources, and to increase their revenue, make mistakes. These holiday eCommerce mistakes are common, and almost anyone can make them.

Sometimes, it is essential to make mistakes to learn from them.

“We Learn From Failures, Not From Success”

Let’s keep this thought in mind and proceed with our blog for the day because we listed the eCommerce mistakes to avoid, along with some bonus tips!

So, Here We Go!

Holiday eCommerce Mistakes To Avoid During The Festive Season

Almost 40% of sales representatives say that closing sales calls is the part they dread the most. But a good close can be the difference between a deal won or lost. But while making these closing calls, sellers or marketers make various mistakes.

Let’s look at some holiday eCommerce mistakes to avoid during the festive season and beyond.

Let’s look at some holiday eCommerce mistakes to avoid during the festive season and beyond.

1. Master Your Prospect’s Purchasing Process

Running a business without knowing your ideal audience is like fighting a boxing match with blindfolds on. No punch would land in the right spot.

So, if you don’t want to get knocked out in this competitive industry, you need to find out your target audience and cater to their requirements.

Finding out your target audience would help you create personalized pitches that users can connect easily with. If you know your target audience, you can create customized content they’d love to read, engage with, and interact with.

So, make sure you know your target audience, as this could be one of the biggest holiday eCommerce mistakes to avoid. Without knowing your target audience, you’d only be shooting in the dark, hoping to hit the bullseye by chance.

To understand your audience, you can ask yourself these questions:

• What’s your target demographic like, age, gender, marital status, etc?
• Where do your customers live?
• What is their buying behavior like? What products do they buy, etc.?
• What platforms are they active on?
• What challenges do they face in their business or daily life?
• What are their job roles/profiles?

If you have answers to these questions, you have a good idea about your target market. However, there are many other questions you can answer to gain a more accurate understanding of your ideal audience.

If you have answers to these questions, you have a good idea about your target market. But there are many other questions you can answer to have a perfect idea about your ideal audience.

2. Limiting Promotions To Discounts Only

No doubt, discounts are the most reliable method of boosting your festive sales.

But it can also turn into one of the holiday eCommerce mistakes that you must avoid if you depend on it too much. It is said that during the holiday season, the more discounts you offer, the less money you make.

Too much discounting may also question the quality of your top eCommerce business. There is a misconception among buyers that lower prices indicate an undervalued product. So, don’t rely on giving discounts only. You can also prefer other promotional techniques like,

• BOGO offers
• Combo offers
• Gifts with purchase
• Free samples
• Vouchers and coupons
• Free shipping
• Complimentary subscription

Here’s an example from a brand for the Columbus Day Sale,

To make the banner images more attractive and visible, it is advised to use bright colors, which are very evident in the image, or colors that match the occasion. You can also use these tactics. This would compel customers to spend more to get more discounts, and eventually, you’ll make more sales.

3. No Influence No Authority

As a brand, it is your responsibility to evolve and adapt to the latest marketing trends and strategies, and if you do not, you are making one of the eCommerce mistakes that must be avoided. One such popular marketing strategy is “Influencer Marketing”. In fact, many marketing experts will say it is hands down one of the best marketing strategies.

Over the past few years, Influencer Marketing has become a quintessential part of marketing and is also showing effective results. Not taking up this marketing strategy is among the major eCommerce mistakes to avoid because the numbers don’t lie – Influencer marketing campaigns earn $5.78 for every dollar spent

If you are new to this, don’t worry!

Influencer Marketing is the most used among various social media strategies. When a social media influencer works with a brand to promote its product or customer service. A social media influencer is someone who has acquired credibility in a particular niche on different social media platforms. They can influence their followers to buy a certain product or take a certain service by promoting it.

4. Burning Yourself With the Manual Workload

“With great holiday sales, comes a great workload.”

Holidays are the time when people are on a shopping spree. And the more they shop, the more you’re burdened with work like sending follow-up emails, offering customer service, replying to common queries, and so much more.

If you invest your time in these tedious tasks, you won’t have time for other useful things. So, the best solution is to automate those tasks that can be automated.

And to automate tasks, you can use a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, etc.

I’d recommend you go with CRM Integration for Zoho as it is user-friendly and easy to begin with. Using CRM, you can automate email marketing, set up chatbots to reply automatically to basic queries, and track and analyze your customers’ data for better insights.

5. Complicated Checkout Process

A complex checkout process prevents users from paying you.

If you don’t simplify your checkout process, it can be one of the major holiday eCommerce mistakes to avoid, especially during the New Year sales or any other holiday sales.

It was revealed in a study that checkout optimization can increase conversions and revenues by 35.62%. Other than that, another study showed that about 66% of customers prefer the checkout process to end in 4 minutes or less, while 28% want it to end within two minutes.

Hence, you must improve your checkout process to make it smoother.

Here are a few ways to smooth your checkout process:

• Minimize form elements and eliminate unnecessary fields
• On the checkout page, do not add any button/link that can send them back to the previous page
• Allow guest checkout and social login for easy checkout
• Improve the navigation of your website
• Create an exclusive offer on the checkout upsell order bump WooCommerce page. 

Implementing these points would help you enhance your checkout process and improve your eCommerce customer retention.

6. Focusing On One Marketing Channel Only

During New Year sales or any other festive sale, eCommerce businesses usually prefer email marketing as one of their most effective tools to stimulate promotions. Especially the events of Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be going to avail maximum output through emails only.

But mere emailing will not reach a wider audience. Thus, you need to spread your marketing wings on other platforms too, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.

Reach your interaction level with those prospects who haven’t even opened your emails in the past 60 days. Now, use these emails and sync them with the social channels of your choice.

You get several media on these social platforms that you can use to communicate with the audience. One of the most trendy mediums these days is chatbots. They are easy to build and set up, don’t require too much effort, and market your brand pretty well.

Apart from messenger bots, you can also make use of features like

• Live video ads
• Recorded videos
• Facebook groups

The surprising part is that you will notice a sudden enhancement in responses to your ads from your inactive subscribers.

7. The Inaccurate Content Of Landing Pages

We neglect the content of our landing pages, it’s true.

Sometimes, it is difficult to depict why the landing pages are underperforming. This is one of the holiday eCommerce mistakes that might sabotage your conversions. So just avoid them as they are reluctant to your targeted holiday sales growth.

Why are landing pages so crucial? Well, there are many reasons for this. The top one is the fact that it helps you convert potential buyers into actual customers. For other reasons, check out this resource….

Here are some tips you need to take care of to write great copy for your landing page:

• Don’t bore your landing pages with overloaded content. Give a glance at your visitors about what you actually do and how you could benefit them. Nobody wants to waste their time going through a chunk of paragraphs. Some of the tools are –

Some of the tools are,

1. Unbounce
2. Instapage
3. Leadpages
4. Launchrock
5. User testing

• Minimize redirects, heavy images, and infographics as they tend to slow down the loading speed of your landing page. Use tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights to examine the loading speed of both mobile and desktop.
• Avoid ineffective CTAs with lame messages. Use strong and creative verbs that force your customers to take action, like “Start For Free” and “Get Me An Expert”. And perform regular A/B testing on your landing pages.
• Implement social proof on your landing pages. For example, MailChimp boasts a case study as social proof on its homepage.

Avoiding this sale mistake can result in better conversion rates and more engagement on your landing pages. Not only in the new year period but also beyond it.

8. Lacking A Solid Return, Refund, And Exchange Structure

30% of all the products bought online are returned.

This means 3 out of 10 products you sell would come back to you. And if this number of returns can come, you need to be prepared for it.

Not having a solid return and exchange structure can be a huge one of the biggest holiday eCommerce mistakes to avoid. This is because many users stick to a brand just because they have an amazing RMA policy.

While building your return, refund, and exchange policy, you need to take care that no customer suffers while returning or exchanging them.

9. Unleashing The Full Potential Of Social Media

Social media can bring significant holiday sales to your online store. According to Forbes, 76% of social media users have purchased something they saw on social media. This shows that if you speed up your social media promotions, you can multiply your sales.

You can try different methods to promote your products on social media. You can use trending hashtags, host a giveaway, offer gifts to your followers, or run a marketing campaign.

Share these types of posts on social media to catch the attention of your target audience. But while marketing on social media, always remember to stay relevant. Acting like a desperate salesperson on these platforms will lead you nowhere.

So, make sure you don’t push your audience to take action. Don’t share posts that are only meant to promote your product. Instead, share posts that tell them the benefits of your products and how they will help them in their business.

Bonus Tip:  Traffic coming from social media has lower bounce rates than organic or direct traffic. That means if somebody visits your website through social media, they’ll engage more than others and will be more likely to convert. All you need to offer them is an unprecedented experience.

10. Unable To Analyze And Comprehend The Trends

Businesses that do not consider this point fall short in their results. If you don’t want to be a part of those businesses’ lists, you need to analyze and understand the data.

Analyze last year’s trend around the New Year’s season. Look what changed as the new year season approached. This will give you an idea of what to do to stay in the good books of the customers.

But remember, every trend fades away.

So you can’t depend on last year’s trends as well. Something new will be in the limelight in the current season, so you need to monitor that as well. You can analyze what your competitors were doing during last year’s New Year season or festive season.

A competitor analysis will provide you with actionable insights on what can be done to stay ahead of your marketing rivals. You can check out the best-selling products of your competitors. And what kind of content they generate. Other than that, you can track what products are trending in your niche. Or what changes were taking place on your website last year this season?

We will brief you in a bit about the latest trends to keep an eye on. For now, you can check this out…

To analyze trends, you can use free tools like Google Analytics, and Google Trends.

You can research the upcoming trends to be better prepared. We have discussed this in the upcoming section.

To Sum Up…

These were some of the trends to look out for in 2025.

In this blog, we have tried to cover all the possible aspects that will help you generate great sales revenue during the festive season, and we have also mentioned the holiday eCommerce mistakes to avoid that will help you boost your sales and revenue. Still worried about increasing your store sales? Check this resource out, 

I hope this festive season brings your eCommerce store sales & growth.

Happy Selling!!! 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What are the most common eCommerce mistakes to avoid?

Some of the common eCommerce mistakes to avoid are poor user experience caused by a complex checkout process, slow loading speed, neglecting essential elements – mobile optimization, not being able to prepare for an influx of early shoppers, express shipping, zero customer support, and not retargetting old users.

2. How can I reduce shopping cart abandonment?

Around 70% of shopping carts are abandoned on average worldwide. The rise in cart abandonment rates over the past five years is evidence that online store owners want a shopping cart optimizer solution, such as Save Cart Later by WP Swings, to achieve better business outcomes. It is a cart optimizer that enables you to improve sales figures without having to deal with cart abandonment. It optimizes your users’ carts so they don’t have to delete their favorite items from the checkout page.

3. What are the common mistakes in social media marketing?

Be creative with your social media, using timely updates and relevant resources. Your target audiences will love it! Some of the common eCommerce mistakes in social media marketing are –

• Not analyzing past performance to understand what worked and what didn’t. It is important to identify the most effective platforms, ROI-driving channels, and content types. These are some of the metrics that you should consider when you are preparing the new holiday social media strategy.
• Not hosting giveaways for engagement. And if you give away free stuff, you are indirectly increasing the likelihood of more sales in your store.
• Not leveraging user-generated content. If you tap into the genuine experiences of your customers, transform your brand’s online presence into an interactive and relatable space.
• Not running a hashtag campaign. Running a hashtag campaign will make your brand presence unique and help your brand stand out in the crowd.

4. How can I optimize my website for search engines (SEO)?

eCommerce SEO is the art and science of optimizing your online store’s content, structure, and technical elements to improve its visibility on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Some of the strategies that you can use for optimizing your website for search engines (SEO) –

• SEO Keyword Research
• On-page SEO Tips
• Optimize URL Structure
• Use Internal Linking
• Utilize User Generated Content
• Technical SEO Strategies
• Get Better At Link Building
• Measure Your SEO Marketing Effort

5. How can I use content marketing to drive traffic?

Content Marketing is like a ladder for achieving business success. It is important to have a good content marketing strategy as it increases customer engagement, enhances brand loyalty, improves customer lifetime value, boosts sales, and much more.

The content marketing strategy consists of the following stages:

• Awareness: In the first stage, you can create awareness about the brand’s products and services through your content.
• Convert: Provide the reason to your customers why they should choose you and what difference you are making for them.
• Closing Stage: In the closing stage, the leads are converted into customers.
• Delight or Nurture: Provide the best experience to your customers that they have ever had.