The time has arrived: holiday shopping season! While many dread the struggle of finding the right gifts, navigating the mobs in stores and waiting for delivery of online orders, a select few also have to worry about how they’re going to sell products and services during this highly profitable season.

It can be easy to forget about opportunities or otherwise make mistakes during such a short window of sales. Thankfully, experience is the best teacher, and many have learned from their holiday sales mistakes in past years.

Today, we’ll give you some tips on what to avoid doing this year, next year and beyond.

Failing to Secure Inventory

While no brand wants to be dealing with surplus inventory, many more brands make the mistake of not ordering or producing enough product during the holiday season. While it can be difficult to judge exactly how much of each product is needed, past sales history should be able to guide you in the right direction. Whether you’re pinging URLs to product deals on social media or targeting customers via search engines, make sure to account for any boosts from your efforts and ensure you have enough product to maximize profit during this season.

Not Using Digital Marketing

With so much competition out there, you cannot reasonably expect that everybody – or even loyal customers for that matter – will find your website or come back to it for their shopping needs. As such, an aggressive digital marketing campaign is essential during the holiday season. Brands that forgo this lose an incredible amount of potential sales. While some focus exclusively on Black Friday and the surrounding days, the entire month of December is also an excellent time to intensely pursue marketing efforts on social media and via search engines in pursuit of new and past customers.

Failing to Take Advantage of Email

Brands with established customer bases have built repositories of email addresses; why wouldn’t you use this during the holiday season? For those who fail to target customers via email with offers, discounts and promotions, money is simply being left on the table. Given that email marketing is highly effective when targeting customers who have previously shopped with you, it is a huge mistake to not pursue this strategy during the holidays.

Not Optimizing the Checkout and Mobile Experience

Even if customers arrive at your website, there is no guarantee they’ll follow through with purchases. One of the biggest hurdles in converting visitors into customers is the user experience. Both checkout and mobile browsing experiences can be frustrating when unoptimized; websites that do not use mobile responsive design or that require customers to jump through several pages to complete their checkouts are harming their holiday sales. In many ways, it’s worthless to be pinging URLs to products via social media and search engines if you inevitably drive customers away with bad interfaces.

This year’s holiday season isn’t over yet: there’s still time to learn from others’ mistakes! By incorporating this information into your broader holiday plans, you can improve profitability and create more satisfied customers.