Planning for the holiday shopping season is always a bear, but this year it’s especially difficult.

Is Prime Day going to encroach on holiday shopping?

When is Black Friday actually going to start?

When will the Christmas shipping cutoff happen?

What should we plan for with the US presidential election?

How can we prepare for all the unknowns?

Today, we’re releasing a tool to help retail brands and online stores navigate this volatile holiday season: a 2020 holiday season ecommerce planning calendar that’s fully customizable to the needs and tactics of your brand. This is going to be a living document – so, as more news comes in about a potential October Amazon Prime Day (and the inevitable response from Walmart), when major retailers are launching their own Black Friday deals, how things are shaping up for shipping delays and what that means for “last chance” planning, we’re going to be updating it each step along the way. If you download this once, you’ll be notified the moment things change or we add more to the template.

2020 Holiday Season Ecommerce Planning Calendar

Our fully customizable calendar comes pre-loaded with insights across Social, Search, Amazon, and more.

Get the Calendar

The holiday calendar template comes pre-loaded with tons of advice on:

Key Dates: Not just Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but other opportunities like Green Monday, Giving Tuesday, and the fast-growing Singles Day, the largest day of online shopping globally

General Strategy: We tell you when to plan for every seasonal promotion, when to adjust budgets and bids, and more

Paid Social: Incorporate Pinterest strategy and wrangle the Facebook algorithm to your advantage

Paid Search & Shopping: How to not lose sales when relying on automated bidding, and when to plan Merchant Center changes and schedule holiday campaigns

Amazon & Marketplaces: Deadlines for getting inventory to fulfillment centers so you don’t lose sales, and how to ramp your spend up and down for Amazon, Walmart, and beyond

YouTube: When to start production (no, it’s not too late!), video ads to create, and flight times for campaigns

All of the content in the calendar was compiled by our most experienced ecommerce strategists across those tactics. At Metric Theory, it’s not atypical for us to deliver 50%, 60%, even 100% performance growth year-over-year for first-year clients over the holiday season. This is a window into how we do it – preparation, understanding the landscape of opportunities, and enough reps to know exactly what to do and when.

This year more than any other, you need as much help as you can get to withstand the expected surge of competition and push your brand to a new high water mark for the holiday. With this resource, you don’t need to become a client to add us to your team for this final push. Let’s get to it!

Share: