Prepare for Peak

It’s almost the most wonderful time of the year. Before you know it, your days will be filled with mince pies, red-nosed reindeer, and enough wrapping paper to cover your whole office. But if you’re like us, and your world revolves around online retail, you can’t put your feet up in front of the fire just yet. Peak season is fast approaching and it’s often the busiest period for many merchants.  

With two-thirds of the UK planning on shopping during the major sales events that take place in winter, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s important that you’re prepared to capitalise on the massive potential traffic increases during peak period. From optimised product descriptions, to tracking inventory, we’re going to share some of our top tips from decades of retail experience to help get your site ready for peak, as well as showing you exactly what Productcaster can do for your website. 

What does Peak Mean for Online Retail?

For online retail, peak often refers to the period of the year from October to December where retailers see the biggest increase in traffic and sales, culminating in Black Friday and Cyber Monday where the majority of transactions take place for this period.  

In 2025, Black Friday falls on 28th November, with Cyber Monday following on 1st December however, shoppers start planning their purchases much earlier. This means it’s never too early for you to start planning for peak and getting your site looking its best.  

Productcaster’s Top Tips to Prepare for Peak

Preparing for an onslaught of highly engaged, ready-to-buy users may seem like a daunting task, especially if this is your first time experiencing peak as an online retailer. However, there are a few easy wins and best practices to bear in mind as we approach peak period which’ll help you get ahead of the game, not only attracting new customers, but retaining them long after the twinkly lights and tinsel have been taken down.  

Keep your Budgets Under Control

There’s no point planning ads or content for over the festive period if you’ve got hardly any budget leftover for Q4. More so than any other time of the year, you need to make sure you’ve got plenty of resources to work with. This is especially important for PPC as rival bids will become much more aggressive over peak with everyone fighting for the high-intent audiences who are shopping during this period.  

This increase in cost means you should be keeping your budgets under control for the rest of the year to avoid having to scale back your campaigns when you need them most. When trying to save money on your Google shopping ads spend without compromising on performance, the easiest thing you can do is use a CSS to list your products.  

By listing your products with a CSS partner such as Productcaster, you can reduce your CPC costs by up to 20%, allowing you to reinvest the savings into other areas to maximise visibility and reach. Not to mention, you’ll gain access to even more specialised support and insights to power your peak.  

Stay on Top of your Inventory

There’s no point using up all your budget on paid ads which are directing users to a landing page of sold-out products. Manually updating your stock availability in real-time can be a difficult task, especially when you’re potentially experiencing unprecedented levels of sales. The most important element of this is understanding the status of every product on your site. 

Stock-keeping Units (SKUs) 

A stock-keeping unit (SKU) is a vital element of online retail, providing each product on a site with a unique identifier.  These not only allows merchants to track the stock levels of products, but they do also so much more. When properly optimised, SKUs can provide you with valuable information about the performance of your products. Properly categorised and named SKUs can make categorisation easy, allowing you to drive customers towards relevant products.  

However, this is a time-consuming task and during the busiest period of the year, you likely don’t have the capacity to update and optimise each SKU yourself. That’s why tools such as ProductMaximiser are so important – allowing you to easily categorise SKUs, manage out-of-stock products, and ensure all your products are looking their best.  

Make the Most of your Product Feed

SKUs are just a small part of keeping your products up to data and there are several other ways you can push performance this peak through product feeds. Your product feed contains all the valuable data about your products so use it to your advantage. 

• Detailed product information: Using high quality images of products and quality product titles and descriptions will not only help Google understand your products, but it’ll also make them more appealing to potential customers. 

• Update regularly: Ensuring your product data is up to date and accurate across all channels is vital for improving user experience and conversions. This includes ensuring any price or availability changes are updated simultaneously.  

With our FeedManager tool, we’ve helped our clients improve their campaign reach and CTR by automating many feed management tasks, easily publishing and optimising product data across all channels, giving you time to focus on what matters most to your business. 

Get Ahead of the Game

Peak planning should always start months before traffic begins to pick up. A big part of this is understanding your goals and planning for how you’re going to achieve them.  

To do this, you’ll need to be able to test your campaigns and demonstrate the value of your products before they go live to understand if you’ll be able to hit your targets, or if further optimisation is required.  

This is why we’ve developed our ProductTester platform, allowing you to test SKU-level product optimisations to refine your feed for better results through effective A/B testing and intelligent recommendations.  

Don’t miss out on our next webinar

This article was adapted from a recent webinar our team did with IMRG, providing valuable insights to businesses to help maximise their performance this peak. Make sure you don’t miss out on our next webinar on October 2nd with Google where we’ll be uncovering the latest trends and data which are shaping this year’s peak. 

Sign up now and join us as we share how you can take your online performance to the next level with Productcaster.  

Or, if you’re ready to start your Productcaster journey now, book a demo today and get your business peak ready.