5 Ways to Get Your Lulu Direct Store Ready for the Holidays

Marketing 5 min read

If you’re familiar with or use Lulu Direct, you know it means that you’re managing your own online store with Shopify, Wix, or WooCommerce. And that’s a lot of work. Building site pages, product pages, setting up payment capture, and shipping settings take time and patience to do right.

So today, I’ve got five tips for preparing your Lulu Direct store specifically for the coming holiday season.

Start Planning Now

Whenever you’re reading this, it’s a good time to start your holiday planning (unless it’s like June or earlier, you can probably chill). But otherwise, you really can start thinking about how to maximize your reach and sales during the busiest shopping time of the year.

I’m offering you a few ways to ensure your Lulu-fulfilled products are as successful as possible through the Holiday season. As with any print-on-demand service, there are nuances that you have to take into account.

1. Review Your Site’s Metadata

This one often gets overlooked: you should review your site’s metadata. Make sure each page has a description and a meta-title. Add alt text to all of your images.

If you’ve got pages that aren’t product pages, carefully look those over too. Be thoughtful with keywords that your potential readers might be searching for.

This is also a time to review your help pages, terms, and any other pages that support your main site. Look for dead links, images that aren’t loading, and outdated content. It might seem insignificant, but little errors like this can dissuade shoppers.

2. Audit Your Product Pages

Go to each of your product pages and give them a careful review. Look at the book description, pricing, details, images, and anything else you include. You should also add your books to your cart and make sure everything in your store's checkout looks accurate. If you can afford it, I recommend ordering a copy of each of your books, too, just to experience the process and be sure everything is working smoothly.

For your product description, consider adjusting the text to be holiday-focused to emphasize why your book makes a perfect gift. If you’re offering discounts, mention those.

3. Audit Your Projects

Your product pages are on your ecommerce platform—Shopify, Wix, or WooCommerce—but your projects live on Lulu. These are where the details associated with your book and the files used to actually print your book can be reviewed and updated.

The best thing to do is to go to your Lulu account, sign in, and check the Project Details page for each book you’re selling. Download the interior and cover files to give them a look over. Maybe you want to add a special introduction for holiday buyers. Or a unique cover for the season.

That’s as easy as revising your project and updating the files!

Simply ensuring your products and projects are up-to-date and error-free can save you countless customer support time.

4. Understand Fulfillment Times

Lulu prints and ships your orders as they come in. This is a wonderful order fulfillment model (especially for books) because it reduces waste and eliminates the overhead costs associated with warehousing/packaging/shipping the books yourself.

But... printing books as orders come in means there is a fulfillment timeframe you must take into account. Lulu books ship from our facilities and are on their way to your customers in as little as 3-5 days. However, it's vital to understand that as we approach the end of the year, production times can increase.

Books take time to print, trim, and bind. Glue needs time to cure.

As I’m sure you understand, shipping times can vary wildly, especially during the holiday season when lots of us are ordering and shipping gifts.

At Lulu, we keep our printing and fulfillment times up-to-date in our pricing calculator and the shopping cart. But we cannot predict carrier variables. If we could, I promise you we would.

Which leads to my next tip.

Sell Your Book, Your Way

Sell books on your Wix, Shopify, or WooCommerce website with Lulu Direct.
Or use our Order Import tool for your next book launch.

Learn About Lulu Direct

5. Create & Communicate Clear Shipping Policies

You need to make it clear to your customers: order early and allow at least two weeks for printing and shipping to be safe.

Your customers need to understand that you are not Amazon. So, not being Amazon, your customers will have two main questions you will need to be completely up-front about.

How Much Does Shipping Cost?

This is an easy one to communicate and execute, as you'll have your shipping costs displayed to customers in their cart.

What you may need to communicate is that shipping is in addition to the retail price you charge for the book (unless you’ve set up free shipping options, of course). Make sure your readers have a very clear sense of what they’re getting at each shipping level—what’s the difference between Mail and Express in terms of time and carrier?

All of the information you need about shipping options lives in Lulu’s Help Center. You should reference these articles for your own help content.

When Will My Order Arrive?

This is a more complicated question to answer when you're using a print-on-demand service, simply because there is production time, as well as transit time.

Setting correct expectations is the name of the game here. Estimating both of those time frames as closely as you can will be critical to your communication.

This means your up-front message to customers should let them know that if they use your Mail shipping option, their order should take around 14 days for delivery. As a general rule, it's a good idea to have these total fulfillment times available for customers to see within your cart.

It’s also smart to create a return policy and understand Lulu's return policy. Provide clear instructions for contacting you if there is an issue with an order.

Getting Holiday Ready

The more you can prepare, the easier and smoother your holiday season will be. Yes, marketing and discounting are the most important parts of your holiday plans. But all of those marketing efforts will point people to your site.

Don’t lose them once they land there with errors, misleading details, or unclear policies. Tighten up your website to help ensure those new readers who come in through your holiday marketing make a purchase they’ll love.