The most profitable season for eCommerce is approaching and you better make sure that you're store is ready for all of the business that's coming your way. Now is the time to work on your conversion rate optimization and necessary precautions, while you still have some time until people will start making their holiday purchases. 

Servers

Imagine that you're starting a great sale on a new and fancy item in your online store and people really dig it. Sounds great, right? Not in case, if you aren't ready for unexpected surges of traffic to your store. Imagine all of the lost revenue from such a disaster. Not to mention the possible reputation issues, which might cause irreparable damage to your store's conversion.

There are plenty of online tutorials and checklists that can help you get prepared for situations like these. Here's a good one for newbies, created by Google.

Also remember that your hosting provider most likely offers autoscaling capabilities. For example, the providers that we offer for MageCloud users - Amazon AWS and Softlayer, both offer this feature.

Images and Banners

Proper holiday images and visuals on your site get your visitors in the right mood. Images play an important role in purchasing decisions and the psychological undertone that they carry can mean a lot. Here's a great holiday imagery guide about the trending and important image concepts that you should use this time of the year.

But be sure not to overdo this. You don't want to lose your brand's identity to some seasonal images. Be smart about this and hire a professional designer to work on your website's visuals. 

Stock

Do you have your most purchased items in stock? Are you sure that you have enough of everything and your supplier is not late with the delivery? This is very important, because, similar to a website's blackout due to increased traffic, out of stock issues may cause a significant loss of revenue. People will just go and buy from your competitor. Make sure that your stock management extension is working properly - be sure to check for any updates every now and then, otherwise it might stop working in the most critical moment.  

Checkout Process

The same applies to your payment processor and the corresponding extension that you might have installed in your Magento store. Check if it's up to date. Make sure that there are no account issues to avoid having your account blocked.

Keep in mind that online fraud activities are also high during the holiday season. Here's a short list of Magento fraud prevention tools, which we compiled recently. Give these solutions a try, if you are not sure about your payment security.

Would you add something to this list? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.