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Shoppers are finding you. The question is whether you're ready. Here's how to boost sales, win new customers, and grow through the rush.
Key takeaways
How can small businesses prepare for the holiday season?
This guide covers the trends and insights you need for holiday prep.
Holiday e-commerce trend | PayPal solution |
Social and mobile are driving last-minute transactions. | PayPal Checkout: Built to help process fast mobile and social conversions. |
Consumers are increasingly turning to financing options to help manage full carts. | Pay Later: A flexible payment option built directly into the checkout stack. |
Digital gift cards have become widely popular for holiday gifting. | Digital gift card support: Easily supported within PayPal Checkout. |
If you tap into these trends, grab attention with holiday promotion ideas, and prep accordingly, you can help optimize e-commerce holiday sales, conversion rates, and repeat business.
If you leverage holiday e-commerce trends, focus on seasonal workforce prep, and manage your cash flow, you’ll be primed to bring home holiday profits. Any merchant can address these items head-on with the small business checklist below.
The holidays can be won or lost at checkout. So if you want to know how to supercharge conversion, you have to optimize your checkout. Being set up correctly will provide a low-friction checkout, fewer abandoned carts, and increased revenue.
How can small businesses optimize checkout?
PayPal Checkout can answer all your holiday point-of-sale needs.
Having Pay Later in your checkout stack can be a game changer, as it helps customers spread out payments while still being able to add everything they want to their cart. And with over 670 million people predicted to take advantage of around the globe Buy Now Pay Later solutions by 2028,2 it’s clearly something customers want.
While offering Pay Later is a great start, where payment options appear can also impact sales. Since 43% of shoppers said they would abandon a small business cart without Pay Later3, it helps to show these options early. Adding Pay Later messaging directly to product and cart pages, rather than just at checkout, can encourage shoppers to complete their purchase. Best of all, this update is easy to enable at no extra cost.
Fraud is another hot topic. It tends to rise during the holidays, so having PayPal Checkout with built-in Fraud Protection can help reduce your risk and avoid chargebacks, a headache you don’t need during the busiest season for shoppers.
Early visibility. Bigger holiday sales. Optimize now.
A smooth checkout is only useful if the cash it generates keeps moving. While the holidays often mean a lot of cash coming in, you’ll be spending cash, too. Which is why it’s important to keep in mind that the faster you get paid, the more funds you’ll have on hand. Stay on top of your cash flow with PayPal solutions like PayPal Invoicing and a checkout stack that features Pay Later. The PayPal Business Debit Mastercard ®4 is also a great way to manage your holiday cash flow and earn cash back5 while you do it.
Cash flow funds the next piece: the people who help you handle the rush. Our holiday workplace checklist will help you build a well-balanced team that can help out when the holiday rush kicks in. Because we all know that not having the right (or enough) people in place can create missed opportunities.
How should small businesses staff for the holidays?
Hiring temporary employees before the seasonal rush gives you plenty of time to find people who are a good fit for your team. Pro tip: You’ll need to think about funds early to cover additional staffing costs. A PayPal Working Capital loan6 may be able to help you bridge the gap.
What is working capital? It’s a type of business loan that’s ideal for seasonal workforce prep and stocking your inventory. Best of all, you can pay it back as you earn.
With staffing covered, the next place holiday chaos shows up is in your invoicing.
Small and independent businesses can get overloaded, particularly service-based pros like consultants, caterers, and contractors. A flexible invoicing solution can keep holiday cash flowing, take the load off your administrative work, and keep you focused on what’s most important: making those holiday sales in the first place.
How can small businesses manage more invoices during the holidays?
It starts with an invoicing option that does a lot of the work for you. PayPal Invoicing for small businesses generates professional invoices with built-in tracking, automatic reminders, and easy payment options. In fact, 77% of PayPal invoices are paid within one day.7
Learn how to create and send professional invoices with ease this holiday season.
Getting paid is half the job — getting the order there on time is the other half.
When it comes to shipping and fulfillment, our holiday shipping best practices will tell you that transparency is key. Customers are eager to check holiday shopping off their to-do lists and get gifts wrapped and ready to go. Having the right shipping and fulfillment goes a long way toward keeping customers both jolly and loyal.
How do small businesses avoid shipping delays?
It starts with clearly communicating holiday shipping deadlines, then using automated confirmations to keep customers aware of delays and delivery date updates. A simple solution like PayPal Invoicing allows you to include shipping terms directly on your invoices. You can even offer local pickup so customers can grab their packages on their own schedules, giving you a chance to say hello and build relationships, too.
One more way to capture last-minute demand once the rest of your operations are ready: gift cards. Every holiday season, you see customers shopping for people who are impossible to shop for. Digital gift card purchases can be a major source of revenue and a win-win for both your business and last-minute shoppers.
How do small businesses sell more holiday gift cards?
Bundling digital gift cards with a holiday promotion is a great option for shoppers who want to find the right gift and a good deal. Just as brick-and-mortar stores place items near checkout for last-minute purchases, you can showcase digital gift cards at online checkout to help unlock this additional holiday income source. Thankfully, PayPal Checkout provides an ideal solution for easy promotions and gift card integration.
Ready to make the most of the holiday rush? PayPal is here to help you through the holidays. So let’s do this.
The holidays can be hectic, but they are also a chance to get paid faster and keep growing. Gearing up with the right solutions now means fewer surprises later, so get your business ready with PayPal Checkout and PayPal Invoicing today.
Keep building your holiday toolkit: Need more ways to optimize your store for the seasonal rush? Explore these resources to help capture demand and streamline your operations: