The holiday season remains the single most consequential stretch of the year for small business revenue. It accounts for 30% to 50% of annual revenue for small businesses, making fourth-quarter sales critical for their yearly survival and success. Shoppers are starting their holiday browsing and buying earlier every year, spreading their budgets across weeks instead of concentrating spend into a single weekend.
For small business owners, this shift is an advantage, and those who prepare early consistently outperform those who wait. So, what should small business owners actually be doing right now to get ready?
Get Your Payments and Checkout Experience Holiday-Ready First
This sounds obvious, but it’s what merchants put off until the last minute every year. If your card reader is slow, if you can’t take a payment outside at a pop-up or holiday market, if your online payment link doesn’t work smoothly on a phone, you are losing sales during the exact weeks when foot traffic is highest.
One of the most important items for vendors heading into holiday markets this season, time and time again, is flexibility: make sure your reader works on cellular data in case Wi-Fi goes down, come with a backup charger, and be ready to pivot when things don’t go as planned.
Make the Story Part of the Sale
Shoppers are not just looking for discounts this year; they’re looking for meaning. Think of a candle shop owner who hand-pours each batch, or a bakery that explains why its pie recipe hasn’t changed in three generations. That’s marketing small businesses can do that a national chain simply cannot fake. Even how you decorate a holiday market booth, the music you play, the way you greet a stranger’s dog walking by, becomes part of your brand story. Save the deep discounts for when you need them. Lead with what makes you, you.
Make Loyalty Part of Your Setup
SumUp research found that 73.2% of small businesses still operate without any kind of formal loyalty program, largely because owners assume their customer base is too small to justify one. That assumption is a costly miscalculation, because among businesses that do invest in retention, 69.1% report a major or moderate increase in sales. This gap shows up differently across industries: nearly 27% of quick-service restaurants say they don’t know how to implement a loyalty program, and a similar share of service-based businesses see loyalty as irrelevant to their model altogether. Both are missed opportunities heading into the year’s busiest sales weeks.
You do not need an app or a big budget to get started. A simple tiered approach works well: give your best repeat customers 24 to 48 hours of early access to holiday deals before opening them to everyone else, let email subscribers preview offers a few hours ahead of the general public, and tease your holiday promotions on social media days before they launch. A punch card, a small thank-you after a fifth visit, or an early-access text to your regulars before your holiday sale goes live to the public are all excellent places to start. This rewards the people who already show up for you and gives your biggest sales days a running start instead of a cold open. Retention is a growth engine small businesses tend to leave untouched, and the holidays are the best time of year to start using it.
Don’t Wait Until December to Prepare Your Inventory and Staffing
With early holiday shopping becoming the norm, October is functionally becoming the new November. Look at what sold out fast last year and what sat on shelves, start conversations with suppliers now while they still have capacity, and make sure your point-of-sale and payment systems can handle a traffic spike without buckling. If your shelves, your staffing, and your systems aren’t ready by the first week of October, you are already behind the shoppers who’ve started.
The Real Competitive Edge
Winning the holidays comes down to who shows up ready, stays true to what sets them apart, and gives customers already in their corner a real reason to return. The small businesses that come out ahead this season won’t be the ones chasing new traffic with deeper discounts. It will be the ones who’ve already built something worth coming back to and make it easy to do so. That’s a fight small businesses can win every time.
Andrew Helms is the CEO – USA at SumUp, a global financial technology company, where he leads the U.S. market focused on empowering small and mid-sized businesses with an integrated payments and loyalty POS ecosystem and exceptional, U.S.-based, bilingual customer service.
Photo courtesy Getty Images for Unsplash+
