Today is my birthday, but I’m thinking only about Christmas. I already spent one day shopping for presents, one evening writing cards and the Christmas tree is up and decorated. I also already received presents from my family. It’s true that it is my favorite season of a year.

Few people hates Christmas, because it’s busy, there is not enough money and you have to actually think about what to buy for everyone. But this year it was really easy for me to buy presents. I made a call to my sister-in-law. I haven’t met her much last year (because we are living in different countries) and we started to discuss what everyone likes. So I came to conclusion – you can find present if you know one word that would describe, what person likes. E.g. my-sister-in law likes cute things, my sister loves fashionable things, my brother likes something that is fun and my mother is very practical. After this information it was really easy to find presents. I spent only 3 hours shopping.

And what I found practical also was to buy a box full with different Christmas cards. Last year I actually bought them one buy one and it took a lot of money and time. I also save all addresses in one file so each year I just go through it and I don’t have to ask people for addresses again and again. I actually enjoyed writing letters to my Japanese friends in kanji and katakana. Haven’t been writting in Japanese for a while

Now that I’m happy again, I have to write something about work. Will use different post about it (cause would be confusing to put everything in one).

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.