You're probably already preparing for holiday peak season: getting bestselling products in stock, lining up promotions and making sure your marketplaces are ready.
But even with a sharp focus on these essentials, peak season has a way of exposing inconsistencies in holiday readiness planning. During the 2025 holiday season, consumers spent more than $4 billion online on 25 different days (opens in a new tab), according to Adobe. When demand stays that high for that long, even small gaps between systems and teams can quickly affect the customer experience.
A complete product catalog won't help if inventory is out of sync. More marketplaces won't matter if your team can't fulfill orders on time. And a successful product promotion can become a customer service problem if delivery and support aren't ready for the demand.
We've divided peak-season readiness into eight stages, covering everything from catalog quality and marketplace coverage to inventory, fulfillment and customer care.
Use these stages to assess your holiday readiness and build a practical plan for the holiday season ahead.
1. Prepare your catalog for discovery
Your holiday catalog should give shoppers and the platforms that surface your products accurate information about what you sell.
Start with the areas that matter most:
- Audit hero products, seasonal SKUs and high-traffic items (opens in a new tab). Prioritize products most likely to drive holiday sales and make sure titles, descriptions, attributes, images, variants, identifiers and specifications are complete.
- Review the details that vary by marketplace. Align taxonomy, product relationships and content requirements for each marketplace.
- Optimize for AI-powered discovery (opens in a new tab). Generative engine optimization (GEO) depends on complete, structured and reliable product data (opens in a new tab) that AI systems can understand when they evaluate and recommend products.
- Check for accuracy. Look for unsupported claims, missing certifications, prohibited language and inconsistent measurements that could create marketplace issues or customer confusion.
- Use AI with appropriate oversight. AI can enrich product content at scale, but humans should review ambiguous, regulated or high-risk content.
Timing: Start early and complete a final quality check before holiday campaigns launch.
2. Confirm marketplace coverage and channel fit
The right holiday channel mix depends on where your customers shop and what your team can support at peak volume.
As you evaluate marketplaces:
- Analyze audience and product fit (opens in a new tab). Does the marketplace reach the right customers and make sense for your assortment?
- Run the numbers. Consider margins, geographic relevance and operational requirements before committing to a marketplace.
- Know what will change by channel. Assortment, pricing, promotions, content and fulfillment rules can all vary by marketplace.
- Be realistic about capacity. Adding a marketplace has little value if your team can't maintain listings or fulfill orders reliably at peak.
Timing: Confirm your marketplace plan before you finalize your holiday assortment and campaign calendar.
3. Get inventory ready for holiday demand
Holiday demand can change quickly, so know where your inventory stands before it peaks.
To prepare inventory, focus on a few key areas:
- Identify priority products. Look at bestsellers and seasonal products by channel, market and variant. Flag the products where a stockout could have the biggest effect on holiday sales.
- Review your demand assumptions. Compare forecasts with supplier lead times, reorder thresholds and safety stock. Have a plan for demand that exceeds expectations.
- Keep inventory in sync. If a product sells on one marketplace, other marketplaces need an accurate view of what remains available. Keep inventory updates frequent enough to reduce overselling.
- Don't overlook bundles and gift sets. Make sure every item in a bundle is available and that the product data is complete before promoting the assortment.
- Know what happens when plans change. Decide who can reallocate stock, pause promotions or respond to supply disruptions.
Timing: Start planning well before peak campaigns and keep monitoring inventory throughout the season.
4. Validate fulfillment and delivery promises
Customers don't see your warehouse or fulfillment systems. They see the delivery date you promise.
Before peak demand arrives:
- Review fulfillment capacity. Check marketplace service levels, carrier coverage and holiday shipping cutoffs. Make sure your fulfillment operation can handle expected volume.
- Make delivery information accurate. Confirm shipping costs, delivery dates, pickup options and holiday deadlines wherever customers see them. Update this information quickly if fulfillment capacity changes.
- Test the complete order journey. Follow orders from checkout through delivery and customer notification. Look for gaps in tracking or exception handling.
- Plan for delays. Decide what your backup plan is if a carrier is delayed, a warehouse hits capacity or orders exceed expectations.
- Keep delivery information consistent (opens in a new tab). Ensure product pages, checkout, marketplace listings and customer-service communications show the same information.
Timing: Test before your first major promotion and review delivery performance weekly during peak season.
5. Strengthen returns and customer care
The customer experience doesn't end when an order ships. Customers may need to change an order, track a late delivery or return a gift.
Get your team ready by:
- Clarifying return policies. Make sure holiday return windows, marketplace rules and product-specific restrictions are clear and up to date.
- Planning for support coverage. Plan for higher support volume and assign owners for complex customer issues.
- Preparing for common questions. Give teams answers to common questions about delivery, orders, returns, refunds, products and inventory.
- Testing the return process. Make sure customers can request a return, your team can process it and refunds are issued correctly and on time.
- Checking for patterns in customer queries. Look for recurring questions that reveal inaccurate product information or delivery promises.
Timing: Finalize the support playbook before campaigns begin, then update it as new customer support patterns emerge.
6. Improve mobile conversion and checkout
A product page can look perfect while checkout tells a different story. Before sending more holiday traffic to your website or marketplace, experience the full shopping journey yourself, especially on mobile.
Pay particular attention to:
- Product pages. Make sure pricing, promotions, shipping costs, delivery dates and return information are easy to understand.
- Checkout. Test guest checkout, form fields, error messages, authentication, payment options and order confirmation.
- The handoff between systems. Verify that checkout matches the delivery and inventory promises made earlier in the journey.
- The mobile experience. Test priority products on mobile devices and across major browsers.
- High-impact friction. Before increasing traffic or promotional spend, fix issues such as checkout errors or payment failures that could prevent customers from completing a purchase.
Timing: Complete a full test before major campaigns and keep monitoring for issues throughout peak season.
7. Plan for advertising and retail media
Make sure your holiday campaigns align with your inventory, fulfillment capacity and customer experience.
As you create a plan, remember to:
- Match promotions to inventory. Validate that promoted products have enough stock and your warehouse and fulfillment partners can handle the extra orders.
- Make the offer clear everywhere. Check that ads, product pages, promotions and marketplace listings show the same product information. Customers shouldn't see one offer in an ad and another on the product page.
- Get campaign mechanics in place. Confirm budgets, audiences, sponsored placements and product listings. Test tracking and assign someone to approve campaigns before they go live.
- Build interest before peak. Give shoppers reasons to consider your products early. Publish reviews, create gift guides and update seasonal content before peak demand.
- Define what success looks like. Track sales by product and marketplace, and compare campaign costs with results to identify the promotions worth continuing.
Timing: Build the calendar early, launch priority activity before peak and optimize as the season progresses.
8. Set up peak-season operations and measurement
Peak season is a bad time to discover that critical decisions have no clear owner or essential information is scattered across systems. Teams should be able to answer three questions quickly: What's wrong? Where? Who needs to act?
Before demand picks up:
- Clarify ownership. Decide who is responsible for product listings, inventory, orders, shipping, customer support and marketing.
- Give teams the information they need (opens in a new tab). Surface product, inventory, order, return and profitability data in one place.
- Establish a peak-season cadence. Decide what your team will review each day or week. Set alerts for low inventory, late orders and other problems so your team can act quickly.
- Monitor operational health. Track whether product attributes are complete, listings are being rejected, inventory counts are accurate, orders are arriving on time and customers are getting timely responses.
- Connect operations to business results. Track how stockouts, listing problems and late orders affect conversions and margins.
Timing: Commit to an operating model before peak and keep it in place through the post-holiday period.
Turn our checklist into a holiday readiness operating plan
Holiday readiness means preparing both the customer experience and the operations behind it. Use these eight stages to identify gaps before peak demand hits, then shift your focus to monitoring and responding as the season progresses.
But as channels, products and orders multiply, keeping catalog and marketplace operations aligned gets harder. Mirakl Connect (opens in a new tab) gives brands and sellers greater visibility and control across those operations.
The best time to find cracks in your holiday readiness is before a customer does. Our eight-step checklist can help you fix peak-season issues while there's still time.
