I just read post in Silicon Republic about online sales increasing over Christmas. A lot of people who owns shopping sites doesn’t realise the problems there might occur because of this. If you are an owner of such service please overview the things below:

1) Traffic will generally increase. This would mean that your server must be able to handle a lot of requests per second. It shouldn’t slow down the site otherwise clients won’t return.

2) A lot of people will be accessing at the same time. From technical point of view you must ensure that tables aren’t locked so they can access same data. Also there will be need of multiple database connections.

3) Don’t delay updates till Christmas do it now. Most of the people shop month before Christmas or even earlier. You should put your new offers on the site now.

4) Ensure page can be found by search engines. Just go and google your site after different keywords. And see where it comes up. If it doesn’t, something is wrong and you have to fix it up soon.

5) Ensure you have enough stock or ensure that clients can’t order on the site more than you can provide. This is a great mistake when you charge people, but can’t provide them with goods.

6) Put few payment methods on site. Few people use Paypal, few credit cards, laser cards and other payment methods. Think twice who are your customers and which method is the best.

7) Think about advertising. If your site is popular, put some banners up and earn more money over Christmas.

Automatize your site. Don’t do your billing and stock management in Excel sheets over Christmas. You will get insane. Make it automatic over the site. Don’t stress yourself, Christmas is time for you to relax.

9) Don’t make your site look like it is never updated. Put discounts on front page. Place some nice Christmas design over your site. Make people want to return there.

10) Get nice photographs. One of the most important things for shops online is for photos to look nice. If it is amateur made, nobody will buy it. If there is no photo, nobody will buy.