Returns surge planning for January
The January surge is a capacity problem with a cash problem attached. Both are forecastable from what you shipped in November, and neither is solved by the returns app somebody wants to buy in December.
CATEGORY
Operations posts
Everything we have written on operations — 31 posts, newest first.
31 posts on operations
CategoryOperations
Support load during peak, and the content that reduces it
Peak does not bring new questions, it brings the same five at ten times the volume. Every one of them can be answered in October, on the page where it gets asked.
Live monitoring: the dashboard you need for four days
Peak monitoring is not analytics with a faster refresh. It is four signals, a written threshold under each one, and a named person whose job is to say something out loud.
What to do in the last week before Black Friday
Nothing you build in the last week will beat anything you rehearse in it. The work is proving the discounts, the rollback and the rota — and saying no to everything else.
Gift cards, store credit and the refund you would rather not make
Store credit is a fair offer where the return is your goodwill and a bad look where the customer has a right to their money. The mechanics decide which one you are running.
The Black Friday runbook
A readiness checklist is what you do in October. A runbook is what someone opens at 2am with a phone in one hand and no time to think.
Loyalty tiers and the maths behind them
A tier is a discount you have promised in advance to the people most likely to buy anyway. Work out what it costs before you name it after a metal.
Analytics you can trust during peak
Peak is not when you fix your measurement. Decide in September which four numbers you will act on, prove they agree with the order data, then freeze the instrumentation.
Shipping rules that match how you actually ship
Most complicated shipping setups are a diagram of the warehouse pretending to be a checkout. Start from what the customer is allowed to choose, not from how the parcel moves.
The pre-peak code freeze, and what it should cover
A freeze that stops everything gets broken by the first urgent request and then means nothing. Freeze the things that cannot be undone from the admin, and leave the rest open.
Order editing, exchanges, and the operational cost of flexibility
Shopify will let you edit an order and swap an item. What it will not do is tell your fulfilment app, your ERP or your reports that you did.
Inventory forecasting for a store with seasonality
Every default inventory metric assumes a flat sales rate. On a seasonal catalogue that assumption is wrong in exactly the weeks the decisions get made.
NEXT STEP
Free store audit
A senior Shopify engineer reviews your storefront, theme performance and checkout, then sends a prioritised list of fixes.