Five Things to Do (Right Now) To Prepare For End of Year Trading

Above: An ecommerce leader who prepared for Q4. Moisturised. Thriving. Living her best life.

It’s not Christmas yet. But now's the time to get in the spirit.

Q4 doesn’t sneak up on you. It barrels through the front door smashed, wearing glitter and shouting about shipping deadlines. And every year, without fail, otherwise capable brands still find themselves panic-posting, inventory-light, and entirely reliant on a 40%-off flash sale to hit their number.

That’s not strategy.

If you want to trade confidently through the biggest quarter of the year, the work starts now. 

It means getting your digital house in order, aligning your teams, and planning like a business that intends to grow - not just scramble through.

Here are five areas we think are worth your time now, while the sun’s still (sometimes) out and the inbox is quiet enough to focus.

1. Stress-Test Your Site Before It’s Too Late

It’s easy to fixate on the front end of your site when you think about Q4 prep but trading success doesn’t live in your homepage banner.

It lives in the quiet dependencies: your product data, your inventory logic, your fulfilment speed, your audience segmentation, your tech integrations, your content cadence, and whether your customer journey actually reflects how your customer wants to shop.

Now is the time to step back and interrogate the whole machine. What’s driving growth? What’s quietly dragging performance down? Where are you overspending for limited return?

At Heur, we typically start with a full audit of the digital ecosystem - trading, tech, media, CRM, reporting - then build a 6-, 12-, and 24-month growth roadmap to make sure every lever is being pulled in service of commercial goals. If you don’t have this level of visibility before peak season hits, you’ll find yourself relying on gut feel in the one quarter you really can’t afford to guess.

Fixing a slow PDP is good. Re-aligning your entire ecosystem to work smarter, faster and more profitably is better.

2. Lock in a Trading Calendar That Isn’t Just “Black Friday”

 “Have we planned for Q4?” “Yes - we’re doing Black Friday.”

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. But a single campaign is not a plan.

You need a week-by-week trading calendar that accounts for inventory, margin, marketing, and resource. What’s launching when? What stock are you overexposed on? What happens if your hero line sells out in October? And how do you keep customers interested once the big day passes?

Smart trading isn't just about discounts. It’s about storytelling, pacing, product flow, and having a clear reason for customers to come back, again and again.

3. Rebuild Your Audiences While You’ve Got the Time

Q4 is expensive. Ad costs rise. Attention drops. The brands who make it work don’t just spend more - they have a spending strategy.

That starts now, with your audiences. Warm them. Segment them. Talk to them like humans. Your CRM and retention flows should be doing the heavy lifting before you even touch paid spend.

Get granular: who bought this time last year? Who hasn’t purchased in six months? Who browsed five times and never converted? Rebuild your email and paid social audiences accordingly.

If you’re not making more from existing customers in Q4, you’re just renting your growth.

4. Make Reporting Your Superpower, Not a Post-Mortem

One of the most common things we hear in December is: “we know something’s not working. We just can’t tell what.”

You cannot optimise what you don’t measure. And you won’t have time to build reporting frameworks mid-campaign. So now’s the moment to get clear on what success looks like and how you’ll monitor it - daily, weekly, and overall.

Your reports should be decision-ready. Revenue, margin, CAC, ROAS, LTV, email performance - everything should ladder back to commercial goals, not vanity metrics.

Clarity here is what gives you confidence to push harder - or pull back - when it matters.

5. Align Your Team (Even If That Team Is Just You + a Freelancer Called Dave)

Q4 is a team sport. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got 30 people or 3 - someone needs to be accountable for every element of delivery.

Who's running what? Who signs off emails? Who’s updating the homepage? Who’s pulling the daily performance report, and who’s acting on it? Too often, peak trading falls apart not because of the plan - but because no one knew who owned what.

This is one of the most common issues we see within businesses - when key stakeholders don’t have the time or ability to manage all of these moving parts, the central strategic vision falls over, things don’t get done and revenue gets lost.

It’s why we’re so bullish on taking on this piece of the work for brands - we can drop in and implement operational excellence across the board, as we’ve got a full expert team and a proven playbook to deliver against.

The point here isn’t to scare you. It’s to spare you.

None of this is revolutionary, but it is critical. And the sooner you get it sorted, the more flexible and aggressive you can be when the moment strikes.

No one wants to be fixing a product feed on Cyber Monday.