December 8th is a date all affiliates and retailers should be penning into their diaries, because this is the date predicted by the IMRG of the busiest online shopping day of the year for 2008, with the busiest hour being between the hours of 1-2pm if we want to be precise.

IMRG estimate that £320m will be spent online on 8th December with a forecast that UK shoppers will spend £13.16bn on the Internet in the last quarter of 2008. 42% of sales are expected to occur outside of traditional trading hours, before 9am or after 6pm.

If these predictions are hit, then this will be an increase of over 15% against the same period last year, though growth would be down against the 54% rise we saw last year.

With this in mind we’ve put together a checklist for retailers and affiliates alike to help see you through the festive season:

• If you haven’t already, start increasing your PPC budgets as traffic will be increasing rapidly from here on in and your budgets will burn out a lot quicker.
• Advertise your last order dates. This is essential to give customers peace of mind that they will receive their gifts in time for Christmas.
• Tis the season for promotions, with the credit crunch in full force everybody’s looking for the bargains, make sure your promotions stand out.
• Think about when your going to land your emails into your databases inbox. Lunch times are a great time to land them as office workers do their “personal surfing”.
• It’s now November 25th, exactly one month away from Christmas Day and if you haven’t already delivered Christmas marketing materials (banners / emails / incentives, etc) to your affiliates it’s a pretty poor show, so get them done by the end of the day!
• Never underestimate the option to Gift Wrap at this time of year. The majority of gift merchants offer this as a standard however if your promoting a merchant that doesn’t as an affiliate, you could be missing out on extra commissions.
• Replace “Gift Wrap” with “Gift Vouchers” from the last point, don’t underestimate how popular these are!
• Did you load test your server this year? What happens if tomorrow your traffic increases 10 fold, could you cope? We see this year after year, sites going down because they haven’t properly prepared for the extra traffic they are receiving. Make sure this doesn’t happen to you!

We hope this gives you some food for thought at least, if you have some tips of your own you would like to share feel free to add them as a comment, we’ll add the best ones to this post with a credit to you.