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Holiday Blitz: 5 Learnings from an Internet Retail Start Up

Love holidays?  So do retailers, many of whom earn half to two thirds of their sales during the holidays.  Want to guess which holiday is the biggest?  At $6BN, the winter holidays are the gift giving Superbowl and an order of magnitude larger than any other holiday.

But ask anyone who works in retail, Christmas time is not all sugarplums.  Handling the flood of orders, customer inquiries, delivery issues, and returns can test the very core of an early stage start up.  
During my time off this December, I volunteered to help out the operations of a happiness incubator that I advise called Thrive.  In late October, the company launched thrive-box, an experienced based retail product designed to encourage customers to practice daily happiness.  Here are 5 important lessons I learned about customer service during the my experience of the flood of the Winter Holiday season.

1.       Get Ready for the Big Game:
  • Got enough inventory?  Are you sure? No how matter how well you think you have planned, try to prepare several alternatives in case you need to get more.  Have the contacts, order forms and other paperwork ready, just in case crazy happens and your specially printed note cards get damaged, lost, or oversold. 
  • Practice your processes.  When the blitz of orders is upon you and the site’s link with the shipping site won’t connect, you will wish you had done more testing.  Testing and retesting the ordering, fulfillment, and shipping and the transition points between them will save you having to hand write the shipping labels for 22 orders.
2.       Set and Meet Expectations:
  • Anticipate Questions: There is nothing like fielding more than 30 questions from customers asking if the order will arrive in time to make you wish you had been more specific on the last order date that guarantees holiday arrival.  In fact, beyond the basics, consider a FAQ if you don’t already have one.  No matter how understandable things appear to you, anticipate thoughtful, random, and crazy questions.
  • Get it Right for Everyone: The first iteration of the thrive-box had a few bugs.   Many of the initial customers were friends and family whom were didn’t mention product flaws even if they noticed them.  After some time with focus groups, however, it was clear a few components could be improved.  We took orders offline for 2 weeks while we restocked upgraded components for future sales.  We also sent the new components to our original customers with a few extra surprises and a thank you note. 

3.       Don’t Let Your Guard Down:
  • Stay in the game: No how much you prepare, things happen.  In our case, ordering on the website stopped for 14 hours because of an inventory indicator that wasn’t updated.  Only when customers complained was the issue identified and resolved. 
  • Keep your Substitutions Close By:  Make sure to have back ups for every function with passwords and instructions in case a key person isn’t available. Keep an "in case" list just so everyone knows what to do in case one team member is unavailable. 
4.       When things go wrong, Say "Sorry" and Mean It:
  • Sometimes its out of your control: Our shipping partner lost one of our biggest single orders, delaying delivery for about 10 days.  While there were a few complaints, it would be easy to only address the squeaky wheels and hope the other customers wouldn’t complain.  Instead, I reached out to all impacted customers to apologize and explain the situation.
  • Go for more than even: In addition to saying sorry, we refunded the customers 25% of their purchase price and offered a discount on future orders. 
  • Make it Personal: Finally, for customers who sent the thrive-box as a gift to someone else, I personally wrote a hand written apology poem including the sendor’s name in the rhyme and sent it by US mail.

5.       Debrief after the Game:
  • Take the time to learn: A lot happens during game time, and the priority is to get the orders out.  Once the dust settles, however, its important to recap what went well and what could be improved
  • Fix what you can: Now you have your list, actually fix the bugs and other work-arounds you struggled through during the holiday rush. 


Surviving the holiday retail rush requires preparation, focus, and humility.  It’s also a great way to test your team and business processes to see if you are ready for the next level in terms of scale.  Use it to find and fix things that may work fine under slow conditions but won’t work on game time.   And schedule some time off for New Years.

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