21 things to do to your Shopify store before Peak

Peak season has a habit of arriving faster than you think.

One minute it’s September and Black Friday feels comfortably far away. The next, campaigns are booked, stock is arriving and someone’s discovered the discount code doesn’t work with the free shipping offer.

September is the time to get the foundations right. Make the changes now, test everything properly in October, and you can spend November focused on selling rather than fixing.

Here are the first 7 things we’d be doing on your Shopify site right now:

1. Build your peak collections
   Create your Black Friday, Christmas, gifting and key campaign collections now. Sort the filters, merchandising and SEO copy while you have time.

2. Set up and configure your offers
   Whether it’s discounts, bundles, free gifts or free shipping, decide what you’re offering and build it properly in Shopify.

3. Sort your merchandising
   Use last year’s data to identify your hero products, make your bestsellers easy to find and give higher margin products the visibility they deserve.

4. Fix your product pages
   Answer the questions that might stop someone buying. Check reviews, delivery information, FAQs, product benefits, cross sells and bundles.

5. Audit your apps and site speed
   Remove apps and scripts you’re no longer using, tidy up tracking and make sure your store is as quick as possible before traffic ramps up.

6. Plan your delivery and returns messaging
   Christmas cut off dates, extended returns and delivery expectations shouldn’t be an afterthought. Decide them now and work out where customers need to see them.

7. Build your campaign assets in the theme
   Create your banners, announcement bars and campaign landing pages now, then keep them unpublished until you need them. Peak launch day should be about switching things on, not building them from scratch.

And that’s only the FIX IT stage...

Once the foundations are sorted, there are 14 more things we’d recommend doing before and during Peak, covering what to TEST in October and what to SELL and optimise in November.

We’ve put all 21 actions into a simple two page checklist you can save, share with your team and work through over the next few weeks.