The ecommerce world is ready to see what heights the holiday shopping season will take us to in 2025. While it’s unlikely we’ll see another spike the likes of 2020 anytime soon, climbing retail sales (and a pretty strong Amazon Prime Day turnout) point to a bump in Q4 sales this year.
Leading ecommerce brands are already elbow-deep in their holiday prep, and so should you. If you want to roll with the Big Dogs and grab a beefier slice of the holiday pie this year, now’s the time to check out your to-do list and make sure these tactics are on it.
1. Build the Buzz With an Early Holiday Campaign
With over 50% of shoppers planning to start their holiday shopping in October or earlier this year, building hype for your holiday deals should start before Q4 even rolls around.
To be blunt: It is literally never too early to start buzzin’.
Even if your audience isn’t yet pulling the trigger on holiday gifts, they’re still very much window shopping and drafting their master plans.
So, now that we know shoppers are planning to start their shopping earlier this year, you might be wondering why this phenomenon is happening.
In short, shoppers are smashing “buy” buttons earlier in 2025 because of the economy. An ongoing tariff rollercoaster has many shoppers anxious about what’s to come. So far this summer, 64% of consumers said high prices were their biggest concern, with nearly 50% worried about unpredictable jumps in pricing.
Alongside price anxiety is inventory anxiety, with 20% of people worried about things they love going out of stock.
Instead of dodging what consumers are currently dreading, we recommend soothing their fears early in your buzz-building campaign.
- Advertise your early shopper incentives, like truly unbeatable (pre-tariff) pricing or free shipping.
- It’s also a good idea to incentivize early purchases in September and October!
- Proudly tout that your products aren’t going anywhere for the holiday season and that you’ll be well-stocked.
- Build anticipation for promotions during Cyber Monday, or sweet product drops as you get closer to the holidays.
Whatever you go with, building buzz early is priceless in terms of generating awareness, gaining trust with more-anxious-than-normal shoppers, and firmly plopping down at the top of everyone’s minds for gift shopping.
2. Flex Your Payment Plans
The checkout is where you can seriously make or break the purchase. Too slow and clunky, and you’re likely to see some hefty abandonment. But if you spend some time optimizing that puppy, your conversion rates are sure to take off.
Checkout optimization has been a key strategy for ecommerce brands for a while now. Leading brands have checkout experiences that are fast (on desktop and mobile), intuitive, and meeting shoppers where they are.
Things like one-click checkout and seamless integrations with platforms like Shop Pay have proven wildly successful. But over the past few years, a new checkout add-on has entered the ring: Buy Now, Pay Later.
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options give shoppers immediate access to the gifts they want without a massive upfront cost. Instead, they can get the Dream Christmas Gift for someone and pay it off in neater bite-size (ahem, more affordable) chunks over time.
Offering flexible BNPL plans in your checkout is practically a must-have with an increasingly price-conscious crowd. It’s a way to empower even more of your shoppers to purchase the things they need.
Plus, the addition of BNPL to your checkout can also lead to massive benefits for your brand, like:
- Higher conversion rates
- Bigger order values
- More customers (especially younger shoppers, like millennials and Gen Z)
3. Optimize Your Mobile-first (or M-commerce) Experience
If you think shopping from a tiny palm-sized screen is unbearable, you’re in the minority. Mobile ecommerce, or m-commerce, is on the rise. M-commerce revenue is expected to smash $2.5 trillion in 2025, which is a figure that’s practically doubled since 2021.
And while it may be true that shopping from a larger iPad or laptop screen gives the shopper a bit more breathing room and a slightly better shopping experience, m-commerce has been unbeatable when it comes to convenience and accessibility thanks to optimized mobile payments and just the fact that many of us don our smartphones like a mitten most of the day.
From November 1, 2024, through the end of the year, US consumers spent roughly $110 billion from their comparably massive desktops, laptops, and other big screens. When it came to teensy tiny mobile screens? Shoppers shelled out more than $131 billion, or 55% of all holiday spending.
The future is now, so if you’re serious about scaling your online brand, it’s time to invest in your m-commerce experience.
With mobile commerce dominating holiday shopping, leading brands are prioritizing mobile-responsive designs, fast-loading pages, and streamlined checkout processes. And if you’re feeling extra savvy, dare we suggest building an app for your audience?
4. Don’t Be Basic When It Comes to Discounts
Sure, everyone loves a no-strings-attached discount code plopped in their inbox during their holiday shopping, but they’re not always in the best interest of your bottom line.
When asked what type of promotional offer they prefer, 75% of shoppers ranked tried-and-true discounts as their first or second choice. However, a pretty close 61% of shoppers cited BOGO offers, or Buy One, Get One Free, as their first or second choice.
The issue with strict discounts is that they’ve been around forever and they’re seemingly everywhere. A standard 5%, 10%, or even 15% discount just isn’t as enticing as it once was. Instead, modern shoppers say they need a discount in the 20%–35% range to be swayed to purchase, which doesn’t just squeeze margins — it totally obliterates them.
Getting creative with your promotions by adding value instead of diminishing value could not only be the ticket you need to sell more, but they’re increasingly appealing to savvy shoppers.
Try supplementing, or supplanting, your discount scheme this season with offers like:
- Buy One, Get One
- Gift with purchase
- Tiered Buy More, Save More plans
- Early access or deals to VIP customers
These value-added promos can beef up your cart values and spice up your discounting strategy.
5. Embrace Social and Video Commerce
Another growing thread in the ecommerce web is social commerce. Much like its m-commerce sibling, social commerce is a hot, hot market. Globally, this channel was poised to hit roughly $700 billion in 2024. And by 2026, social commerce is forecasted to be responsible for 1 in 5 sales.
Social commerce is exactly what it sounds like. It’s plugging ecommerce capabilities into social media, enabling shoppers to see a product in their feed and buy it without ever leaving the app.
In 2024, leading social commerce platforms included many of the usual suspects, with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest rounding out the top 5 platforms for this channel.
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And it makes sense. All five of those apps strike a must-have balance for social commerce: daily users and visual-first design. These apps are made for sharing things (like gifts, in this case) through video or handsome imagery, and all of those apps are overflowing with eyeballs to see them.
In 2025, the majority of leading ecommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce integrate directly with social media platforms, bringing the intuitive ease of your on-site checkout inside social media platforms.
Study up on social commerce best practices, or tear a page from the playbooks of top brands.
- American Eagle used Snapchat’s augmented reality feature to let users virtually try on pants.
- Burberry mastered the art of short, high-production videos that capture attention on Facebook.
- Ikea’s Pinterest page is a truly immersive catalog that makes us want to buy everything and makes it ridiculously easy to do so if we actually did go buy everything.
- Nike leveraged TikTok to (literally?) call on fans to show off their best football tricks for a shot to win a new pair of shoes.
- L’Oréal has been dabbling with live shopping on Instagram while influencers shot makeup tutorials.
Get the gist? Great brands are thrusting their fans into more engaging and immersive experiences with their products on social media, and before they know it, those viewers are buying what they’re seeing without ever looking away.
6. Tap New Ecommerce Gifting Tech That Makes it Easy to Buy Gifts
Online brands are über aware of how important Q4 is to their bottom line. This span of time is filled to the gills with high-volume days: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Hanukkah, Super Saturday, and New Year’s (just to toss out a few).
Leading brands know that capitalizing on these days takes more than a discount stuffed in another email. Every competitor you have will be filling inboxes alongside you, which means you need to find another way to stand out. You need to offer an experience that not only promotes your hottest gifts but also makes it ridiculously easy to buy those gifts.
Zest is the only comprehensive gifting platform made to optimize the purchase journey for any type of online gift purchase, including corporate and group gifts, one-to-one consumer gifts, and bulk gifting for events like weddings, conferences, or the office-wide holiday bash.
When looking for a tool that makes their gifting CX easy and convenient, brands are on the hunt for one that:
- is super customizable to fit their pricing schemes, discounts, etc.
- looks and feels like a natural extension of their brand, e.g., white labeled.
- fully integrates with their existing ecommerce platform.
- provides data about their gift channel’s audience, revenue, and more.
- integrates with their email and SMS marketing tool in order to generate new personalized sequences and campaigns.
- is extremely intuitive and accessible for the typical online shopper via desktop or mobile.
Brands like Levain Bakery, Brightland, and Milk Bar have been leveraging advanced online gifting, and the 2024 holiday season saw massive corporate gifting numbers.
Levain Bakery doubled their 2025 year-over-year corporate gift sales, with the average gift purchased through Zest being 18% higher than when purchased through any other channel.
Brightland olive oil saw an 86% boost in year-over-year gift revenue through Zest, with total gift orders increasing a massive 117% in 2025.
Milk Bar was able to save its team a heap of time and manual effort. More than 70% of Milk Bar’s holiday gifts were processed automatically, cutting corporate gift processing time from 2 weeks to 2 days. Plus, instant e-gifting enabled the brand to extend its gift-sales window an extra nine days.
Clif Family Winery (yeah, the same Clif from the Clif Bar) grew its Zest-powered corporate gift orders nearly 200% during the 2024 holidays, reaching nearly 300% more recipients than they did in 2023. (That’s a heckuva lot of new people who now know abouttheir brand and products!)
These are brands that have continuously led the way in their categories. From product development to marketing to customer experiences in-store and online, leading brands know the value of every single touchpoint, especially gifting.
Go Ahead, Be a Copycat
When it comes to thriving, the ecommerce world is full of stellar role models. Your team has enough on its plate when Q4 rolls around, and we don’t recommend adding “reinvent the top tier holiday success mouse trap” to said plate.
Instead, look around to your ecommerce brand idols. What are these leading brands doing? What strategies are within your wheelhouse (and budget)? What’s realistic to implement in the next few months?
Whether you coordinate a live shopping sesh on your social media, launch a holiday buzz campaign in August, or optimize your online gifting CX (psst, the Zest team does the heavy lifting for you), we say go ahead. Be a copycat and follow your idols. It just may be the path to a game-changing Q4 this year.
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