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Transcript

So hi everybody, welcome to Commerce and Coffee. Today we’re gonna be diving into our annual peak season preparation session, so let’s get started. Cori has a lot in store for all of us today, so let’s kick it off.

So this is an ongoing webinar series hosted by myself and Cori Gelato. It’s designed to be interactive, so we really encourage everyone to ask questions in the questions box in the GoToWebinar control panel throughout the presentation. You can type them in there, and we’ve set aside the last couple of minutes for Q&A, so we’re gonna do our best to answer as many of those as we can for you. So I wanna quickly mention a few housekeeping items before we get started. We are recording this webinar to be viewed on demand at a later date and shared with other members of your team that might not have been able to attend today. I wanna quickly draw everyone’s attention to the control panel. There is a handout section, and in there is a handout that you can download, and it has a bunch of resources we’ve put together for you, so you should easily be able to download that and use it as needed. If you have trouble downloading it, reach out to me or your success account manager, and we’ll get a copy of that to you. We’re gonna leave some time to answer questions at the end, so again, feel free to start asking those throughout the presentation. If your question isn’t answered, please follow up with your success account manager for additional information. And at the end of the webinar, please complete a short survey that’s gonna pop up on your screen. Those surveys really help us to ensure that we are meeting your expectations at these kinds of events, so we would really appreciate that. All right, with that, let’s walk through today’s agenda.

So first, we’re gonna introduce ourselves, and then Kori is gonna take us through today’s presentation and in-product demonstration on all things preparing for peak season. We’ll then touch upon a few upcoming events and conclude with Q&A, so please, again, start asking those throughout the presentation. All right, with that, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Alana Cohen, and I am the digital events manager for our customer success strategy team here at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. I’ve been with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ for a little over five years now and spent the last three of those years organizing and hosting these events for our digital experience customers. Prior to my time on this team, I spent about two years working with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s Advertising Cloud customers, and then before coming to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ, I spent many years at different advertising and media agencies around New York, but I’m excited to be here now hosting these events for you guys, our customers. If you have any questions about today’s event or comments about any of our customer-exclusive events, please do reach out to me. And now to introduce our local commerce celebrity, Cory Gelato, our senior commerce strategy consultant, who I’m sure many of you know. Cory brings a ton of experience to us at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. He has over 16 years of experience in e-commerce, advising merchants across a variety of industries. Almost all of his time has been with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce or formerly Magento, so he is definitely the one that we all wanna hear from at these events. Cory does strategize directly with customers to ensure that they’re maximizing what ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce has to offer. So if that is something that you’d be interested in, please reach out to your success account manager for more information on setting that up. And we are very lucky to have Cory here as a mainstay at Commerce and Coffee. So with that, let’s kick it off with today’s session. And before Cory starts the presentation, we actually have a poll question for all of you that we want to ask. So sit tight for one second.

And I will launch that now. So how do you plan to optimize your website for peak season? Are you going to improve website speed and performance, enhance mobile responsiveness, implement the user-friendly navigation menu, or maybe all of the above, or maybe none of these, which is not an option. I hope at least one of these. But let us know. How do you plan to optimize your website for peak season? And maybe this isn’t your peak season, your business’ peak season in the holidays, but any peak season throughout the year, let us know.

All right, I’m gonna give this one more second. Looks like we’ve got a lot of votes. A lot of, the majority is improving website speed and performance, and behind that is all of the above. So that is great to see. I’m gonna close out the poll. I can share those results with everybody.

Yeah, so all of the above and improving website speed and performance are those, those are the front runners for this poll. So I’m gonna hand this off to Cory now to start the presentation.

Great, thanks, Alana, and appreciate everybody chiming in on the poll. Welcome, everybody. Peak season, 2023. How’s everybody feeling? Everybody’s feeling good. I wish everybody could answer right now. It’s kind of crazy to think that we’re already starting to get into it. And before I even kind of start jumping into peak seasons and so forth, so on, obviously I wanna acknowledge the holiday season that’s coming up. We have that as a lot of merchants I work with and I strategize with. This is their peak season. It’s coming up right now. And if it is yours, right? If you’re here today and your peak season is starting just in a few weeks, I definitely wanna acknowledge something that we’ve seen a trend over the past few years. It’s that the holiday season, the peak holiday season is starting earlier and earlier every year. So the expectation is this year that it’s going to start even earlier. So now we’re kind of coming into it where that might start mid-October, end of October, early November, et cetera. So what I wanna kind of start with, and we’re gonna really focus on peak season. We’re not gonna focus too much on holiday season until I get to the demo because my business, my peak season is the holiday season. And I’ll talk a little bit more about my fictitious business in just a second. But setting the stage for those of you that are on or getting prepared for your peak season, which is the holiday season. This stat right here is pretty significant. Talking about how that’s coming from smartphones and mobile phones and so forth, so on, that holiday spend is very, very big. And we do know that there is the cyber week essentially. So from you got Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Cyber Week essentially, that is a big portion of that too. So those that are getting ready, I know that that November timeframe is really kind of big, especially those that are in the US. So beyond setting the stage for it and talking about that, let’s just talk about now just generally your peak season. As you’re preparing, as your business, whether it’s cyclical, whether you guys have seasonality peak seasons, whether you have one peak season, whatever that might look like, things that I would really kind of focus and hone in on as an owner of a business, as an operator of certain things with technologies, et cetera is website performance. And it was really kind of cool to see that the poll, a lot of you answered, it was about 40% of you answered around improving website speed and performance. Where that really matters too is ensuring that you are scaled and you’re ready for an influx of traffic. So you wanna do a conduct, you wanna basically wanna look back at what you’ve done in previous years, months, et cetera, review what you’ve done during those peak season. What does those sales look like? Do load testing, identify potential bottlenecks, identify areas where there are potential roadblocks within your server capacity, infrastructure, et cetera. Then you wanna optimize, right? So you wanna optimize your page load times, you wanna compress images, static assets and code, and you wanna implement a CDN. So for those of you that aren’t sure what a CDN is, it’s a content delivery network, essentially cached static assets, HTML, et cetera.

You also wanna make sure after you’re doing all this that you do have an increased server capacity, you increase your database capacity. Again, thinking of things where your CDN, et cetera, making sure your cache hit ratio with your CDN is properly set at every component of your infrastructure, anything that essentially is serving up your website. You do wanna make sure that you are increased and you’re prepared for an influx of traffic, as well as orders, et cetera.

Now mobile optimization. This is categorically, this is for 2023, the expectations for retail and mobile e-commerce, sales accounting for, again, that 43%, that’s the expectation in 2023, and that’s gonna be up from 41% in 2022. That’s huge, we know that mobile continues to keep growing. Your analytics might show something slightly different. There is obviously, it’s not always one-to-one, it’s not always happening month over month or anything like that, but again, categorically, looking at it historically, you are seeing a growth in mobile traffic. So you need to kinda ensure, be in that mindset, mobile first, and I always say that every webinar that I do, it is a mobile first mindset. You wanna make sure that you’re delivering mobile first, and then everything kinda falls into place from that desktop, tablet, et cetera.

Inventory management, this is a huge point. I know that over the past few years, there’s been a struggle with inventory, there’s been some hiccups with warehouses, et cetera. That seems to kind of dive down a little bit. A lot of research that I’m doing, a lot of different folks that I’m talking to, what I’m hearing is that there is inventory. This has been replenished, it’s not as bad, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not selling out still. Especially during your peak season, you do wanna make sure that you do have the stock in place. And if you don’t have stock in place, we’re gonna talk about a few things that you can do during the demo of kinda how you can essentially do product alerts, restock notification, things like that. But do an inventory, real-time inventory tracking, ensuring that when somebody is checking out, you are depleting inventory, sellable inventory, essentially. You do wanna make sure all those things are in place, especially during your peak season. Regardless, you wanna always have that in place. You do wanna make sure that customers are not getting disrupted in their experience, just based on inventory levels.

Customer support is absolutely critical. This is something that I can’t stress enough. In a very marketplace-saturated world, you do wanna be sure that you’re delivering exceptional customer support, because that’s where you’re gonna differentiate yourself. Your customer support should be knowledgeable of your brand, of your product. If you are a retailer and you carry multiple brands, they still should be specialists in what you guys are carrying as products. Make sure you do have this available and increase that customer support during your peak season. You wanna be able to answer issues promptly, so phone calls, live chat, so forth, so on. You also wanna make things very intuitive from a website perspective, too. Things like making sure you have FAQs in place and that it’s very quick to get to as well. You don’t want customers and visitors, et cetera, to jump through those hoops. Making sure that that’s easy to find is really, really good.

I’m not gonna go through every single one of these, but they’re all extremely important. I had a tough time dwindling this down to where I didn’t think that, based on, again, the research I’m doing, the trends that I’m seeing, everything that’s compiling for peak season in general. Again, I’m looking at each season. I’m looking at cyclical aspects. I’m looking at, obviously, the holiday season, too. From what I’m seeing, there’s a lot of different factors here. Most of this is not new, just as reference point. There are some trends that are maybe sketching it a little bit more or just elevating a little bit more, but ultimately, a lot of these concepts, when it comes to e-commerce, have really stayed the same. It’s just about when are you doing it, how quickly are you doing it, and how proactive are you, and how agile are you to be able to change that? Plan, create, use, encourage. You’re setting up, organize, segment. So again, you can see each one of these. And we said this is recorded to you as Bill to reference this again. But these are all really good ideas when it comes to marketing, promotions, especially onsite and even offsite as well.

Your order fulfillment and shipping. This, again, this is something that’s critical, especially, again, when you’re talking about marketplace-saturated worlds, one-day delivery, two-day delivery, so forth, so on, expectations for shipping, and being sure that you are delivering that through that customer journey as well. So this is an example on the left-hand side of the slide. You can kind of see that where it’s saying usually shifts within X amount of days. So making sure throughout that customer journey, it’s extremely important. But beyond that too, order confirmations, shipping emails, shipping tracking, so forth, so on. Those types of things are extremely critical to a very good customer experience. So the time during your peak season is not a time to falter on that. You wanna make sure you are communicating that when you do ship something out, that notification should be sent to that customer, to that buyer, as soon as possible.

Front-site strategies, and again, this kind of goes back to a few slides back, but it’s about kind of doing different types of things. Things like creating curated gift guides. I’m gonna actually walk through that today. That’s one of the specialist things that I’m looking at today. And one of the things that I’m doing throughout my research is helping customers essentially be able to find gifts. They might have ideas, but giving them a way to be able to see those and who they might be purchasing for is a really good way. So I’m gonna showcase that today in an example that I have. You also wanna implement personalized type things. So personalization, we know, it’s huge. Today, I’m gonna try to get to live search a little bit, talk a little bit about doing some personalization effect on there. You also wanna make sure you’re boosting loyalty program rewards, et cetera, those types of things. Showcasing customer reviews, that’s user-generated content. That’s extremely important. Making sure you have that displayed on the site is also a really good opportunity to ensure customers feel comfortable on the site and that they are kind of seeing what your brand is about.

Everything else, redesigning display. Think about how your site’s going to look like. So again, when I’m going through the demo today, I’m really kind of in that mindset as well of what my customers should be seeing and how my peak season looks. For returns, refunds, exchanges, this is something that I’ve spoken to a lot of merchants about. One of the things that rings true in all the research I’ve been doing is extending it. As I said for the holiday season, kind of going back to that, the peak season itself is now two months, three months long, two and a half, three months long, something in that area. So making sure that you have the ability to extend that return policy. So if it’s 30 days usually, might be a good opportunity for you to extend it 60 days, 90 days. If it’s just exchanges, et cetera, whatever that might look like for your business, it’s good to extend that to just be mindful of what you’re presenting to worry on the front end of the site too. So making sure that’s very clear is important too.

Your analytics, your reporting, I think before I kind of touched on it slightly, but be prepared to be agile. Be prepared to make adjustments when needed throughout your peak season. So if your peak season is just a week long, say it’s springtime, say it’s summertime, say it coincides with some sort of business strategy, however long that is, be prepared to make an adjustment where it’s needed. If you need to re-merchandise something, if you need to bring other products into the fold, if you need to change your promotion, anything like that, just making sure you’re looking at your data, looking at your KPIs, looking at every aspect of your traffic and what people are doing and what customers and that journey looks like, and use those analytics to make those data-driven decisions and adjust those strategies where it is needed.

And ultimately at the end of it, what you should be looking at is your post-peak season type details. What does that data look like? Do that analysis, conduct it, look back at your, if you have business intelligence, which I would highly recommend, look back at what customers are doing. What does customer lifetime value look like? Are they purchasing during that season? Are they purchasing during whatever your peak looks like specifically? Use that information. If it’s new time customers, is there a way to bring them back? Did they buy for somebody else? And if they bought for somebody else, is there a way that you can market that as well? So follow up with customers, express gratitude, gather that feedback, promote post-holiday deals as well. That’s extremely important, especially kind of going back to what I was mentioning before with those returns, those exchanges, et cetera, building out that customer loyalty. That’s part of customer loyalty is ensuring that that’s a seamless experience and they don’t have a difficult experience by trying to do some sort of a refund return in our exchange. And with that, Alana, I think we have one more poll just before we get into the live demonstration. If you wanna bring that. We sure do. One second. Then the next poll question should pop up on your screen. So how will you gather and analyze customer feedback to make improvements for the next peak season? Will you use customer surveys and feedback forms, monitor social media comments and reviews, analyze sales and return data or all of the above? Excuse me.

So let us know, what are you, how are you gonna prepare for next year? I know it’s hard to believe even this year’s on us and we have you thinking about the next one, but. All right, it seems like a lot of people are going with all of the above, which is fantastic. All right, I’m gonna close this out and I’ll share the results here. One second.

So yeah, so majority are going to utilize all of the above and then kind of a split between analyzing sales and return data and using customer surveys and feedback. So thanks everybody for sharing and I will pass it back to Corey for the demo.

Perfect, thank you so much and good to see. Good to see that 64% are looking at all of the above. None of the answers would have been wrong there, to be honest, just to be very clear. This is really good to see that you guys are looking at a multi-factor here though. So for today, you guys know this is my business. This is the Luma branding, everything that you kind of see here, anytime that I’ve done webinars in the past, if you’ve joined it, this is always the business that I kind of walk through. But essentially Luma, to give you a little bit of backstory on Luma as my what I’m calling fictitious business, we are a brand that sells essentially fitness equipment. So cardio, weightlifting, yoga, et cetera. And we also do personalized content. So we segment our content out, we segment our business out slightly. So some things that you might see a little bit differentiated experiences on my demo today are based on those segments. So all things that you’re seeing as well is native capabilities within the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce platform. So there’s nothing that’s hard coded, there is nothing that is using a third party extension. Everything is native, adminable capabilities within the site. So I wanted to quickly showcase the site as it is today. This is my site right now. There is no yet ready for my peak season. So what I typically do during my peak season is I prepare everything with holiday graphics. So I’m basically preparing for, again, those October to December, October to January, November to January type months. I’m looking at that as that business. So that’s really where I start structuring what I’m doing. So even my navigation you’re gonna see is going to change here. Right now I have best sellers and so forth so on. And I’m gonna actually add a category for best sellers. I’m gonna change out my home page entirely to make it have a look and feel of seasonality. I’m gonna do things within the cart side. So right now I just have just general mini cart section. And if I go to the actual cart to itself, this also doesn’t have anything too specific. I am calling out my reward points. So again, throughout this I’m making sure that I still am building my loyalty. So no matter what I’m doing, I want folks to know that I want them to be a loyal customer. So I am building reward points aspects. But you’re gonna see a few different factors here that I’m going to do. And I’m gonna talk about scheduling content, scheduling changes, scheduling promotions. But I’m also gonna walk through how to do certain things that I’ve seen merchants do where it’s in real time. They’re making different changes in real time as things are going on. So I wanna start with the home page. That’s the first thing I mentioned. So on the admin side, I’m gonna first and foremost go to my pages side. I’m gonna go specifically down to my home page. So here is my home page that I have available. I’m gonna go into this, I’m gonna edit it. And what I wanna do here is I wanna schedule these changes because I don’t want this yet to be displayed. I’m going to, what I’ve decided looking back at my data, is that November one, my peak season is going to start. I’m going to start seeing customers shop during that time. So what I’m gonna do here is I’m gonna go up to the schedule new update. Now I have a little cheat here. What I’ve done is I’ve actually created content templates. So I’ve saved templates within page builder that I can repurpose and reuse at later times. So I do actually have a holiday one, but we’re gonna do everything else in real time. So essentially I’m gonna launch and end this holiday peak season 2023. That is going to be my update. What we’ll do here is just as I mentioned, I’m gonna do November one, we’ll do at midnight.

I’m gonna close that out and then I’ll do an end date. One little nugget here, you don’t always have to have an end date for changes that you’re scheduling. So for content stages, they don’t need an end date. I am gonna put an end date for this one because I do want my site to fall back to what I just showed you from that front end side. I want it to look back to what it looks like today. So at midnight on January one, I essentially am gonna roll back to exactly what the site looks like right now. Now the changes that I wanna do is within the content side. So I’m gonna go here, I’m gonna look at my page builder aspect. So I’m gonna edit this with page builder. So again, I’m in the preview side and I’m making this adjustment.

So what I wanna do is instead of changing the content here, I’m not gonna do anything where I’m bringing everything in. I’m actually going to apply a template. Like I said, a little cheat here that I’ve done is that I created templates. I have a template that’s specific right now for my holiday season. So I’m gonna go back, I’m gonna look at my created one. So I created one this morning. So what I’m gonna grab is this one. I’m gonna apply this.

And essentially what you could see now is this is my content on my homepage. So not what you see and I’m just gonna hop to the front end for just a second. It’s not this anymore. My homepage is now going to look like this. I do have a dynamic block rotator here. What this means is I actually change out the content block to make sure it’s dynamic based on my customer segment. So like I was saying before, customer personas, behaviors, I actually create segments around this. So just one little note around that. Everything else on here looks good to me. I don’t need to change anything else. I’m kinda getting a little bit of holiday feel to this too, which is really cool. So once I’ve made that change, I’ll close this out. And then I’m gonna go up here and save this. So now what I’m doing is I scheduled that change. We can see it at the top here. I’m gonna go to the content staging dashboard in just a second too. But now I’ve actually saved that chain. We can see that November one to January one is when this essentially is going to be effective. So my next piece that I wanna do is I wanna create that gift guide. So remember I said that gift guide, it’s a really good opportunity. Research is showing that based on my last year, I saw that as well that I had a little landing page. Now I actually wanna make a full category landing page that is around gift guide. So I’ve created a category and that is my gift guide category. I have subcategories, actually I already have them enabled, but they’re not something you can actually see without knowing the URL. But the parent aspect of this, the gift guide itself, is currently disabled. So what I wanna do is I wanna schedule a change around that specifically. Now this page is just a content page for me. I’ve created this page fully just to be a landing page. You can see every single aspect of this is just, again, it’s to kinda go into the sublevels and the subcategories, do a little bit quicker shopping around certain things, so forth, so on. So that’s kinda the page itself. I don’t have any products associated with it at all. So when I do activate this in the menu, it basically is that true category landing page where you are going to see products and subcategories essentially. So with this, I wanna schedule a new update. And in this case, what I wanna do is I’m enabling this category and I wanna include it in the menu. So instead of saving a new update, really cool thing with content staging, it allows me to be able to basically combine a bunch of different changes that I wanna do. So instead of creating multi types of updates, I’m just gonna grab the one that I have. So I’m gonna assign to an existing one. Here’s the launch and end holiday peak season 2023 for me. I’m gonna select that. We can see the selected update is that now. I wanna enable this category as well as include in the menu. So those are the two new updates that I’m making to that category. So essentially making it available on the front end. I will save this update. You’ll see the change right here. It’s around that gift guide. So again, you can kinda see we’re starting to build out. We have the homepage. We have a category page specifically for that. What’s kinda the next thing? It’s gonna be a promotion. So I wanna look at doing certain promotions. So two things that I’m looking for. One, I wanna add a catalog promotion, basically a discount percentage on the gift guide categories. So the category itself as well as subcategories. I’m gonna add 30%, 40% off. So I’m gonna do that. The other thing I wanna do too, and I didn’t call this out explicitly during the presentation but the other thing that I really wanna do is offer free shipping. Cause free shipping is really, really a huge benefit when it comes to shopping. For it’s best specifically for the peak season and my peak season. That’s what resonates the most with my customers. I’ve seen it. Based on my business intelligence and my data, I’ve seen customers go forward with purchases just because they get free shipping on things. We all kinda know that too, right? That’s a very big driver for promotions. So in this case, what I wanna start with, I’m gonna go into marketing, gonna go to my catalog price rule. Wanna schedule a change here. I wanna schedule a new update. So let’s create a new rule here. Now this new rule, like I said, what we’re doing is I wanna create a holiday season promo code, right? So we have the holiday season promo 2023. I’m gonna just do that. Not making it activate. I do not want that active. And then what I’ll do here is I will select all. So I want every customer group. So in the case, you could do different types of private sales events. You can make it on a specific customer group. In this instance, I wanna do it for every single customer of mine. So in here, my condition, the only thing that I’m gonna have as a condition here is for the category itself, I wanna have these categories specific to anything with my gift guide. So basically, the subcategories, the first category, et cetera. And I wanna make it as any of these. I don’t want it to be all. So you can actually have a product from any of these categories. And essentially, the action that I wanna take is I wanna apply a percentage of the original. So in this case, we’ll just do 30%. I do wanna discard subsequent rules. So I don’t want any other catalog rules to be available to this customer as they’re going through this purchase behavior. So essentially, what we’ve done here is we’ve created this new rule. I’m gonna save and continue editing. We do not have it active yet. We do not have it scheduled yet. I have to save it first. Now that I’ve saved it, I wanna schedule a new update for it. And I’m sure you guys know this already because I’m kind of following this, but I wanna make this update just essentially it’s going to activate this rule. So I’m gonna assign again to an existing update. So remember just kind of how I did that with category before. I’ve made that change as part of an overall scheduled update, essentially. So I’m not having to do multi scheduled updates. So in this case, I’m gonna assign this to the new update using that launch and end. I’m gonna activate it. So the only update that I’m doing is activating this essentially. And then I’m just gonna save the update. So no other changes need to be done just besides that active. And now we can see that here as well. So we have the start and the end date. It’s following that. It’s using that same exact name, that same exact schedule. Last one that I wanna do is I wanna do the promotion for cart, specifically for shipping now. So I wanna offer free shipping. I do want it to be over at threshold. So I’ll go into here. And instead of catalog, I’m gonna go to cart price rules. And within the cart price rules, in this case, what I wanna do now is I wanna create a new rule. And I basically wanna offer free shipping for holiday shipping essentially. So we have holiday season, free shipping. So that’s just the rule that I’m calling it. Do not wanna make this active yet. I’m going to add this as part of my main website, my customer groups, selecting everybody. I’m not saying any coupon here. I don’t need a coupon. I want them to actively get free shipping once they get over a certain threshold. So nothing else that I’m gonna do here. I actually am not putting any conditions in because I don’t need any conditions here. My action wise, I’m not doing a percent off of product. I’m not doing anything with this. I’m actually going directly down to here. I’m gonna apply it to shipping. And basically what I’m gonna do here is for anything that basically is going into this, I’m giving free shipping. This is the only part of the rule that actually matters for me right now. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna say price in cart. And this is cart total. So I’m gonna say is equal or is greater than.

So click the wrong thing there. So equals or greater than. And in this case, I’m just gonna say 50. So anything $50 and above within an order, essentially what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna give free shipping. So I’m offering free shipping based on this rule specifically that’s here. So let’s save that.

And we’re gonna do the same thing with this one. We are going to make this as part of that scheduled change. So we’ll go back into the new update. We’re gonna assign it to the existing update. We’re not creating it as a new update. We’re gonna select this one. And the only thing I’m doing in this case is I’m just activating it. So we just saved that rule. It was inactive based on this timing. So start time November 1. It’s going to activate. And then as of January 1st, it will deactivate. So let’s save that. Perfect. So we’re all set. So what I wanna do is now that I have my homepage update, I have my new category created. It’s in my menu. It’s in my navigation. I have promotions that are on that catalog. I also have a free shipping offer too. So I’m doing a multitude of promotions, but I’m also doing, again, optimizing the website. I’m making it a little bit more friendly and more agnostic to what my peak season is and what my shoppers are typically doing. So where can we view this? So two things. I made this change. I could view and edit this here. I could do a preview here, but I actually wanna go into the content side. I wanna show you the dashboard. Right now, I only have one thing set up on my stage or basically stage for content delivery. And that is just this one. Now I’m shortly thereafter going to be working on my new year. So I wanna do 2024, especially because I’m a fitness business. I know a lot of people are gonna shop during that time. So January 1 is kind of another peak season for quote unquote, my business, my fictitious business. So with here, what I do see is what is available right now. So I have this upcoming launch. And if this was active, if we are on November 2nd, this would actually show as active. It would be blue instead of green. You have a few different ways that you can look at this, by the way. So you do have grid, you have lists. So this just shows you basically a list out of everything. You also have timeline too. I just prefer the grid aspect. I think it’s cool. I like looking at it this way. It’s just a lot more digestible for me, but you could see everything through this. So in this, we see that there’s four objects. So we see that there’s a CMS page. There’s a category page. There is a car price rule. There’s a catalog price rule. And we can actually go into this and we can really look at it. We can see which is each one. In this case, I just get a preview for now. So let’s just take a look at the preview. So basically what this is doing, this is showing me the full customer experience. This is showing me the full site as it were to be as of November 1. So what you can see here is this full experience. So remember, the gift guide, the home page itself, I did not have any of this before. These are all brand new based on what I’ve set up essentially. So if I go back, and again, I’m just going to show you the front end as it is today. So remember, I kept that tab open. This is what the front end looks like right now. We have best sellers. That’s the first menu. We also have nothing that is seasonality. We have nothing that’s towards that peak season right now. But our staging preview, we could see. This is completely curated and prepared for what our peak season is going to be. Again, that content, the design essentially, the look and feel, the graphics, et cetera, are all kind of geared towards that. So we can kind of walk through this. We could say, OK, let’s take a look at our gift guide itself. Like, what does this page look like? OK, yeah, this is fantastic. This is that gift guide page. Do we want to make any alterations to it? No one sees this. This is just our preview right now, right? So we see it as what that’s going to look like for everybody November 1. I’m looking through this. Yep, graphics are all looking good. We see this. We see that. All these are looking good. Do I want to go into it? Let’s just take a look at maybe the weightlifting gifts. Maybe I want to add a banner on there at some point right now. I just want to kind of take a look at it. Yep, we see our promotions all are here. Fantastic. If I go into the cart side too, we would also see the free shipping that’s essentially available. Again, we’ll be able to kind of see everything throughout that customer experience, throughout that customer journey. So I’m going to kind of go back here. I want to go back to the admin side. I want to make one change. There was something on the home page. I wasn’t too, I wanted to kind of call it the gift guide a little bit more. I know it’s up here. But what I want to do is I want to add that to the home page somewhere. So maybe I want to add it probably above this, or right below that carousel. So I’m going to go back to the admin side here. So I want to show you kind of how you can do this. First off, remember before, I started this whole thing where I updated the home page specifically as a staged content preview. Now I’m in the content staging dashboard. So I want to update it through here. I don’t even want to go back to the home page where it’s going through content, et cetera. I actually want to update it here. Really kind of cool feature of content staging is I have the ability to do this. I can make any changes I want at this point with anything I’ve essentially staged right from one screen. I don’t have to jump through and go through each section of this. I’m going to go right directly here. CMS pages. That’s specifically what I want to update. It’s my home page. Here this is right here. We have the new home page. I want to update this. So I’m going to view and edit it. You can also delete updates. I didn’t show that. Let me just go back quickly. You can also delete updates from a scheduled content change. So here I’m just viewing an edit. What I want to do here is I want to make a change. Like I said, I want to put a banner, something that’s a little bit more in your face for the content side on the home page. So I’m going to go down here. Here’s that content. This is the look and feel of the site right now, as of, again, November 1. Remember, I kind of put this all in place. So what I want to do, here is that featured block section. I want to add a new row to this. I’m going to drag this over. Don’t mind me. I might not make this completely beautiful, but I’m going to try my best. So I want to do 350 pixels. I want to centerline everything here. And I’m going to put a banner in this. So when you save that, let me go down to media. I’m going to bring over this banner now. And this banner, I want to do the same thing here. I want to make this 350 pixels. For desktop, I’m going to keep this as a poster. And what I’m going to do is I want to select from my gallery for image. So I don’t want to use a video or anything like that. I’m going to actually select from my gallery. One thing that I do just to keep myself a little bit sane and organized, what I do is I use the media gallery. I put folders in here. I get everything ready. You could see my last year holiday season, my 2020 holiday season. You could see different things with my fitness structure, so forth, so on. So in this case, I’m already in my peak season. And in my 2023 holiday season here, I’m going to grab this banner. I think this is a really nice one to use. And what I’ll do is I want to add some additional things to it. First, I just want to make sure everything looks good here. 350, yup, my image is in there. This is fantastic. I also can upload a mobile version of this. But this is kind of center focal anyway, so I like the way that this already looks. I will make the background position, let’s say, top center. Let’s see what that looks like. And then I do want to add some contact to this. So I am first going to add just a link to basically link out. So if you click on my banner, you’re going to go directly to that gift guide page, that category landing page. Also, I’m going to show a button here. I want to add a little bit of a CTA, new shop now. I want this to be my secondary button type. So your CSS style sheet will actually call this. So depending on where your button colors are, mine are going to be gray and blue here. My secondary is a gray one. So I’m going to show that. I also do want an overlay. I want an overlay over the banner, essentially. So I’m going to just show you what it looks like before I do that. So I have the shop now. It’s kind of looking not too great just yet. So I want this to be centered. I want to add some text to this. And I also want to add a little bit of an overlay to this, too. So I’m going to go back into this. So let’s see. So first thing I want to do is I want to add that overlay. I’m going to add a little bit of a gray, add a little bit of a transparency to it. So we’ll do that. I also want to center align that. So this is center aligning all that content, essentially. And in this case, what I want to do is I’m going to increase this. Let’s increase it. Let’s do 48. Going to bold it. I’m going to center align this text. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to add a little bit of a push for folks. I want them to basically, what I mentioned before, there are certain things that you could do like a limited time offer, things like that. There’s ways to do that without a countdown ticker. You could do it just by what you have for your content. So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to say discover the perfect gifts. And I’m going to say before they are gone. If that doesn’t get you going, that’s something that’s going to really push you. You’re going to be like, oh, I got to get this right away. Going to change the color a little bit, because I thought it was a little bit off there. So what I’ll do, yellow doesn’t look great. So I’ll actually use the color picker here. I want it to be a little bit of gold. So similar to the top part, make it a little bit more of a mustard. Grab that. What I also want to do is I want to add some imagery here. So I’m going to throw an image in this as well. Let’s add something here. So I’ll grab. Remember before I had those little boxes, I think that those were cool. So I might just add that into it. So again, you can kind of see I’m building out this content as it stands. So even though I’ve scheduled this, still I’m going to make these updates. Let me put this. I want it a little bit smaller. Let’s see. That’s perfect. OK. Now we have it center aligned with this little gift box. You know what? Let’s throw one at the end too. Let’s see what that’s going to look like. All right. Perfect. Let me save this. Let’s see what this preview looks like. I think it looks fantastic. This looks amazing. Yeah, I’m ready to shop this. This looks great. So I’ve added that banner now. We’ve added the top banner. Then I want people to say, here’s that Discover the Perfect Gifts before they’re gone. Man, I’m going to push people for this. Add a little bit of graphic to it as well. Again, I’m not a designer, but this is something I’m just getting pretty jazzed up about. What I’ll do now is I have that. Let me save this update. Now, a few different things. First, we can obviously preview this again. We could have previewed it back there. So what I’ll do is actually just go back here. And we’re going to just take a look again. So we have that previewed update. Here’s, again, we have all those things that are ready to go. I’ll go into that preview. And this way now, what we’re doing is we’re just seeing what is this going to look like. After all said and done, we made those changes. Maybe we made a few additional changes. Maybe we add an additional promotion to it. Maybe we change certain something with the category, et cetera. But what I do know is there’s that discover the perfect gift. So now I have exactly what I wanted. I’ve added that. It’s fantastic. We have that shop now. So we have a CTA on it as well with a button with an interactive aspect to it too. So it’s really kind of good. This is what I’d be looking to do as I’m kind of getting ready for my peak season. OK. Next kind of piece to this. I know folks on my site. They search based on my data, based on my analytics, folks search. So I’m going to update live search. I want to create a specific rule. While people are focused on gifts, so you kind of can see a theme here. Everybody’s kind of coming to my site right now, and they’re shopping gifts based on data from last year, year before. The search keyword that was most commonly used was gift or gifts. So I’m going to go into live search. And what I’m going to do here is I want to create a specific rule. So I’m going to bypass all this stuff, not go into performance. But specifically, I want to create a search rule. And now another little nugget here. I’m going to create a search rule that is specifically a timed one as well. So if you search gift on my site right now, it’s going to show something different than what I’m about to do. So I want to create a new rule here. And within this rule, what I want to do is I’m going to say the search query contains anything with gifts, right? We can see here’s all of our results right now. So I want to go into this and say, OK. First, my intelligent ranking. Yeah, I want this to be what people are most purchased. So I want live search, the AI automation aspect, to go into this and update the ranking based on what is most purchased over the last seven days. So this could be augmented and changed every single week, every single time that somebody goes to this. It could be different. Now, what I do want to do, though, is I want this to be augmented based on artificial intelligence. I know my business, right? So my business, I’m going to say that the gift card, I want to pin this here. I’m going to use the little pin. The virtual gift card I want to pin here, this at-home gift set, fitness gift set, I’m definitely going to pin that here too. And what I want to do as well is I want to take a look. So this treadmill is also one that I see pretty often. So I’m pinning these, essentially. I’m pinning these to specific locations. Everything else will augment based on what’s going on for our purchase behavior, essentially. Now, the other thing I want to do is I want to just boost up this home gym install. So I want to do that here too. So let’s boost this. This is not pinning it. I’m just boosting it up in the results, essentially, which could be augmented a little bit. But I’ll go in here. Let me type in my home gym installation. So here that is. Let’s boost that. You can see that. Bam, boosted there. The other thing too is that I know for a fact how my inventory works, that the Sprite Yoga straps, this one specifically, not the second one, but this one specifically, I know that we’re going to sell out quick. So I don’t want that to show up high in my results. So I’m going to just bury that down a little bit. So let me bury that and let’s grab that. So Sprite Yoga.

So here is that one. Here’s the second one. We can see group two. So let me grab that. That’s buried down. Now let me just scroll down. Yep, perfect. So it’s down here. I could always hide it too, but I think this is a good opportunity for us. Now, what I want to do is I want to just name this. So in this case, I’m just going to say specifically gift search, fake season.

And what I want to do here is I, again, I’m going to make this where I want it to be a specific time period. With search, you can always just create this open-ended. In this case, I want it to be active, November 1, and that I actually want it to deactivate on January 1.

So we’re essentially saying active this date, active to that date, and then I’m basically going to go up here, save and publish. Now, that’s scheduled. It’s not yet available, but it is something that I already have scheduled. So I’m good. So now I have my browser experience changed at home page, I have my category, my menu, so forth, so on. I also have my promotion set up, and now I’m also activating my search to be part of what I’m doing. So you can kind of see, I’m giving a full experience. Now, there’s one thing I want to kind of go back to. I want to add a few things to my cart side and to my mini cart. I want to add a little bit of promotion, right? So before, there’s really nothing here on my cart that is kind of focused on like holiday, seasonal, anything like that. I don’t have anything that’s specific called out. I want to throw a few things in here. I’m going to do this without content staging. So let’s say we effectively are in our peak season, right? So let’s all pretend we’re on November 2nd. So everything is activated, essentially, at this point. What I’m going to do, simple enough. I’m going to go into a, again, I know a lot of merchants do this too, but essentially what I’m going to do is I have things that I’ve already created. So I’ve created some things that essentially are going to be activated and display in my cart, just to, again, push the envelope a little bit more. So what I’m going to do is, so here’s one. So it’s my BOPIS mini cart banner, my free shipping holiday banner on cart, and then my free shipping cart text promo, right? These are all disabled right now because, yeah, we’re, again, not something that I put part of my, my kind of scheduled content. When I was doing my checklist, I didn’t put this as part of it. So now that we’re at this place, I just want to update these. So I’m going to go into each of these. I’m going to edit these. Here’s these ones right now. They’re all disabled. What I’m going to do is enable them all. Let’s apply this. We’ll save these edits. And now we’ve effectively just basically enabled each one of those. If I go back to the homepage, if I go back to, this is actually, so again, I know you’re not seeing a holiday aspect, but let’s quote unquote pretend we’re at that point where we are officially in our peak season. Now it is November 2nd. So what I just activated was my mini cart here. If I go into the cart side, I’ve also activated this right here, where it says great news. Your order qualifies for free shipping. We are over that threshold of the $50. And if we go down here, we also have the free shipping right above that checkout with multiple addresses. So I’ve essentially covered my areas when it comes to the cart side too. We know folks drop, there’s abandoned car all the time. What I want to do is I want to emphasize what you’re getting. You are getting free shipping because of what you put in your cart. You also are getting rewards. You’re getting all these different types of things that are basically set up at this point for, again, my shopper and my experience. Beyond that, that’s kind of what I wanted to walk through. This is a lot of, again, this is very common aspects. These are common themes, common types of things that merchants that I’m hearing that are working through research that I’m looking at right now. A lot of it kind of positions us really well. Other things, gift options. Again, native capabilities. You can offer gift wrapping paper. You could do gift proceeds, printed cards. You also can check out with multiple addresses. So those of you that do, businesses that have multiple address shipping type things. So this means that you have one cart, but you are shipping to three different locations. You have three items in your cart. You want to ship each one of those to a different location. You could do that with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. It’s a native capability. The types of things where you can also, again, you could try to do some sort of like push the envelope. You get somebody to purchase something faster because you have a threshold. And I know there was a few questions actually during registration around how can we basically give people that context. So you can also say like this one, for instance, I have the only 12 left. You could do that based on what you have is the only X left threshold essentially. So that’s also a native capability. So a lot of kind of great features in there to kind of set the stage for you. And to really kind of again, articulate it from a website side of view of being able to kind of help those shoppers through that. So with that, I will turn this over to Alana and then we’ll get to some questions. So let me bring this back up for you, Alana. Thanks, Corey. I want more than five points on a $500 purchase. So I don’t know if I’ll purchase from you. I’m just kidding.

Well, anyway, thank you very much for that fantastic presentation. As a reminder for everyone, this is being recorded so you can watch all of that back on demand at your own pace at a later time. So as an attendee of today’s session, we wanted to thank you for the support for coming to today’s event. So please keep an eye out in your inbox for an email from us in the next couple of days. And it’s gonna include a link to treat yourself to a coffee on us. So thank you everyone for coming. And I wanna quickly go over a couple of upcoming events hosted by me and our team. So we’d like to invite you to an ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce Intelligence event, which is formerly known as MBI, focusing on holiday readiness. At the event, the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce Intelligence team will demonstrate reporting techniques in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce Intelligence, ACI for short, for obtaining compelling insights from your data in preparation for the holiday season. And then as ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ customers, you get access to all of our customer exclusive events. So we are excited to invite you on October 5th. We have our next session of our Espresso and Experience Manager series. We’re gonna be talking about dynamic media and ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Business Advisors, Casey Witter and Solution Consultant, Kat Cignarino, are gonna be sharing how you can upgrade to dynamic media from Dynamic Media Classic or Scene 7 or maybe another system. So then after that, we have our next session on Marketo and Mocha on October 12th, focusing on program management best practices. We have ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Business Advisors, Cynthia Chang and Kate Colbert, presenting the latest updates to the program library and some best practices in Marketo. Then finally, we have our last session of Commerce and Coffee for the year on November 9th. And Corey is gonna be answering all of your questions at an Ask Me Anything session. So if you have burning questions that we couldn’t get to today or that are not specifically about peak season, please be sure to join us at that session for even more Corey time. And as a reminder, you can find all of our past recordings on Experience League. The link is on the bottom of this slide and it is in the handout as well. So now let’s get to some Q&A. All right, Corey, you ready? Absolutely. Cool. All right, so let’s start. What kind of promotions do customers respond to best? And are they more interested in saving money or the timeliness of shipping or something else? What are your insights? Yeah, so, and I think we touched on it a little bit before and let me actually bring my camera back up here. You guys get to see me go through this. So we talked about it a little bit before. I already touched on it before slightly. So it is something that, it really depends on the business. So it’s tough to say like, this is one size fits all, but free shipping is absolutely something that is, again, proving year over year to be a big driver for driving those sales. There is research and studies that have been done that even if you give somebody 50% off of a product or free shipping, they are gonna go to the free shipping. Another case in point to that is like a free gift too. Offering a free gift builds loyalty, kind of gives those types of information. So I know I’m guilty of it. It’s something that happens all the time and when I see free shipping, I probably go to that. It’s just us subconsciously, that’s what we do. We see free and we’ll go towards that instead of doing something like a 50% off. So look at your data, look at your intelligence, but ultimately it is a business decision, but yeah, free shipping, it is. It definitely kind of crushes it a little bit. Guilty myself, you know? Yeah. Free shipping speaks to me. All right, cool, thank you. So we have one in the Q&A pod from Elsa Paul. Can you restrict free shipping so it doesn’t apply to certain categories? Great question. So I touched on it as I was going through that promotion when I was setting up for the Lumma brand itself. And I did it based on the $50 threshold, but within that same box, you can add an additional condition that says it’s only for these specific categorical items. So you can do that based on SKU, different types of data points within the product dataset itself. So ultimately, yeah, you could base it off whatever it needed to be from a business side. So you absolutely can determine where and when that free shipping is essentially offered. It is by item level anyways. You’re essentially shipping items by item. So that’s essentially, yeah, exactly right. Awesome, thank you. All right, let’s keep going. How do you feel about remarketing? Is it worth the investment or would customers come back anyway? Ah, so I don’t know if that’s specific towards peak season, but I’ll answer in both ways. Yes, remarketing, again, research around it. There is that the thought of it. So sometimes you do have window shoppers or virtual window shoppers. They’re going through your catalog, they’re going through your PDPs, et cetera. But remarketing is such a huge type of a converter. You kind of are reminding somebody, you’re like poking them essentially. So abandoned card emails, but remarketing. So that’s all part of that remarketing technology and aspects. So you can basically say, hey, guess what? You were here before, why don’t you come back? Why don’t you purchase this? We still have it for you. Maybe throw to them, hey, we got free shipping now too. That’ll also entice them. So those types of things, yeah, absolutely. Remarketing, huge, definitely. Great, thanks. All right, I’m gonna keep moving. I think we have time for a couple more. How far in advance do you set up your holiday CMS products? Page, static, blocks, coupons before publishing them? Yeah, so for a lot of research that I’ve seen, they obviously recommend do it as soon as possible. I know that gray area. I know what merchant life is like. So you obviously have marketing, you have merchandisers, you have all these different people that are kind of having their hand in the pot at the same time. So it’s a little bit tricky as soon as you possibly can. Because you can curate it, you can change it. I just kind of went through that with that home page. You can make changes to it. So as soon as you possibly can, because you’ll have the data that’s there, you’ll be able to prep yourself as early as possible. With the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce platform, you could schedule three years out, four years out, a year out, a month out, a week out, a day out, whatever you’d like to. So as soon as you possibly can. But I know the reality of the world too. So that sometimes makes it a little bit tricky. I know we’re September 14th, we’re talking about holiday peak season. It seems like it’s a little bit premature. It’s not kind of. Everything that I went through just now isn’t static. It’s not concrete. It could change. So as soon as you can, even if you’re just doing little things here and there and critiquing it as you kind of go through the next few weeks.

Awesome. Thank you. All right, one more question I think we’ve got time for. How far in advance do you suggest increasing service capacity and anticipation of the holiday spike in the proper? Yeah, it’s a really, really good question. So this is infrastructure related specifically. And we didn’t go too much into the technical weeds today, but I have a blog. I think we’re gonna be sending out a handout too, just around the five P’s peak performance, those types of things. Honestly, if there’s a endless aisle of money, I would say as soon as you possibly can. So if you’re on-prem, if you’re an on-prem customer, an on-prem merchant, you have your own infrastructure somewhere, I would say as soon as you possibly can, start running those tests, start running those diagnostics, do load testing, do load testing, absolutely do load testing. Make sure you guys are prepared, make sure that you have your infrastructure ready. If you have everything that we just did today, we have the look and feel, we have the promo set up, we have the category set up, everything looks awesome and amazing. If the site goes down, it’s irrelevant. Nothing that you’ve done, any of the preparation you’ve done it means nothing at that point. So as soon as you possibly can get that up and running, I would say minimum production wise, have that up and running about a week in advance. A week in advance before you think your traffic is coming in. Obviously, if you’re on an infrastructure that has a little bit of like type of auto scaling or your hybrid auto scaling, you obviously could get some things up and running in a day, you can get them up and running in a few hours before you do like a flash sale or something like that too. So it’s a great question as soon as possible, but you don’t have to go too far in advance. All right, thank you, Corey. We are at time, so I’m gonna wrap us up. If you have a question that we weren’t able to get to today, please reach out to your Success Account Manager for more information. And as a reminder, you will receive the recording of today’s event in an email from GoToWebinar in 24 hours from now. So as one last reminder, you will see a survey pop up on your screen as you’re leaving today’s session. If you can fill that out, it should take you less than two minutes, we would greatly appreciate it. So thank you everybody for attending. Have a great day. Good luck with peak season. And we look forward to seeing you at one of our next events. So thanks, everybody. Thanks, everybody.