Twenty-six states set hospitalization records over the Thanksgiving weekend, and public health officials spent the holiday urging anyone who traveled to act as though they'd been exposed. That's the backdrop for a lot of members heading into December still trying to hold a normal holiday selling season together — and it's exactly why we're bringing back our storefront webinar, live this Thursday, December 3.
This isn't a rerun of the spring session for members who had nothing online at all. It's built for the much larger group who threw together an order form, a spreadsheet, and a payment link back in March or April, kept it running all year out of necessity, and never had a slow week to go back and fix the parts that were always a little broken.
What actually gets covered
The session runs through three things members ask us about most: cutting the number of steps between "see the cheese" and "pay for the cheese," setting up an out-of-stock flag so a sold-through wheel doesn't sit on the page taking orders you can't fill, and building a simple holiday-hours banner so customers don't call asking whether you're open. None of it requires hiring a developer. Most of it is an afternoon of cleanup on a storefront that's already doing the hard work of existing.
We'll also spend fifteen minutes on order-cutoff messaging — how to tell a customer, plainly and early, the last day you can guarantee holiday delivery. Members who set that date two weeks earlier than felt necessary last year told us it saved them from making promises they couldn't keep once volume picked up faster than expected. With case counts climbing again this week and carriers bracing for their own staffing strain, that cushion matters more this December than it did in a normal year.
Why now, and not after the holidays
We considered waiting until January, when there'd be more room to actually implement changes without disrupting a live selling season. We didn't, because most of what's covered here takes under an hour to fix once you know what to fix, and an hour spent this week can still catch three weeks of December orders. If your storefront is already running fine, this may not be the session for you. If you're not sure whether it is, that uncertainty is usually the answer.
The webinar is free, virtual, and open to all members — no cheesemaking or technical background assumed. Bring whatever storefront you're running, however patched together it is; we'll work from real examples members send in ahead of time rather than a generic template. Register through the events calendar, and if Thursday doesn't work, we'll have a recording up within a few days.
Looking further out, there's encouraging news on the vaccine timeline — federal regulators have set a mid-December meeting to weigh authorizing the first candidate, which is the first real date anyone's been able to put on next year's recovery. That doesn't change what this December looks like for your business, but it's the first specific milestone we've had in months, and members have told us it's helping them plan spring with slightly more confidence than they had in October.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.