Set the Seasonal Vibes: How to Optimize Your Corporate Storefront for the Holidays

Think of your corporate gifting storefront as the window display to your favorite mom-and-pop shop in Downtown, USA. While you don't spend any time actually in the display, it definitely sets the tone for your entire shopping experience.

And a perfectly executed holiday display? Well, there are few things that get folks more in the holly jolly spirit than that.

Your corporate gifting storefronts should do the same — grab attention, set the seasonal vibes, and easily usher people toward your best gifts this year. From visual appeal to product offerings, these are our top recs for getting your storefronts to convert more gifters this holiday season.

Keep reading to learn:

Goal: Make your main storefront feel like a winter wonderland. We’re talking holly, jolly, cozy, hygge — whatever sets the stage for your shoppers to get in the gifting spirit, that’s what you should do.

While gifting is a year-round behavior, we recommend making Q4 holiday gifting feel like a real event. The best part? You don’t need a massive overhaul to set the vibes. With just a few visual updates, your gifting storefront can reflect the holidays and make every shopper feel that special feeling.

Your storefront’s banner graphic is the first thing shoppers will see when they land, so it’s important to set the tone right in the first few seconds. Your holiday-themed banner could include a few seasonal touches — think spools of ribbon, gift-wrapped packages, tufts of snow — or it could go beyond images and include a seasonal greeting or promo, too.

Remember, your banner image should follow these guidelines:

To update your main storefront’s banner image, go to Storefronts > Main storefront > Branding. Click Custom header graphic and upload your fresh holiday banner. Click Save, and don’t skip checking your storefront to see how it looks!

When it comes to your product imagery, we recommend keeping it simple — especially if you have a lot of products in your storefront. Overly artistic or complex product images could kill your conversion rate (and eat up a lot of time you might not have in Q4).

Keep your product images simple and scannable. Your shoppers don’t want to click into every single product to get a closer look, so make sure your catalog is legible at a glance while still looking professional and high-end.

To update your storefront’s product images, you’ll have to log in to Shopify > Products. In the Media section, click the existing image for your product to edit it, or click the “+” to add a new image.

Our top tips for product images:

Time to turn your focus to your digital card selection.

To add more digital cards to your storefronts, you must first add digital cards to your Partners Portal. Go to your Partners Portal’s main Settings > Branding. Scroll to Digital gift cards and upload as many seasonal greetings as your heart desires. Click Save.

To add digital cards to your main storefront, click Storefronts > Main storefront > Branding. Scroll down to Digital cards and click Select digital cards. From there you can select which cards you want in this storefront from your entire library of cards.

Get creative and add a variety of card designs from modern and trendy to classy and timeless, covering a few holidays (and not just Christmas). However, make sure to balance variety without an overwhelming number of options. Try to stick to 10–12 card designs per storefront.

Remember, your digital cards should follow these guidelines:

While you’re giving your storefront a seasonal glow-up, also consider refreshing your gift catalog. Even if you’re not offering any new or limited-edition products this Q4, it’s possible to make it feel like you are with a few light touches. Read on for some quick tips and to-dos.

Before gifting ramps up, it doesn’t hurt to give each of your product descriptions a once-over. You’re looking for anything that’s outdated, conflicting, or unnecessary, as you want to keep your product descriptions as clear and concise as possible.

To update descriptions, go to your account in Shopify > Products. Click into the product you want to edit, tweak the description, and click Save. Your product descriptions in Zest will update automatically, typically within a few minutes.

Tips for a helpful product description:

You’ve heard of analysis paralysis? Unfortunately, your gift catalog isn’t immune to this psychological event. For gifters, trying to juggle hundreds of products and their accompanying prices, details, and features becomes too much to digest. Choice overload also leaves shoppers second-guessing their choices and wondering if they may have missed something even better.

The solution? They simply leave your store.

To avoid sending shoppers into a decision daze, pare down your overall catalog to just a few pages in your Zest storefront. Each page holds up to 12 product cards, so try and limit your core offerings to ~36.

Value-seekers make up roughly 40% of shoppers. (What’s more is that these value-seekers are also likely to spend more with your store if your stuff is perceived as a good deal!) And this is where the curated holiday bundle comes in.

Curated bundles offer several benefits:

Here are some of our favorite bundles right now 👇

Add-ons in your Zest storefront have always been a powerful tactic for increasing impulse purchases or sales of those “little something extra” people toss into their gifts. Things like tote bags, merch, and the like do especially well as add-ons.

However, when it comes to the holidays, this is the prime time to offer those luxe touches gifters are seeking.

To offer add-ons in your main storefront, you’ll first need to designate a product as an add-on in your general products catalog. Go to your Partners Portal > Products. Beside each product, you’ll see a kebab menu (the three vertical dots). For the product you want to offer as an add-on, click the menu and check the box beside Is an add-on product.

Next, navigate to Storefronts > Main storefront > Products. If you need to add this product to the storefront, click Select products and choose it from the list of available products. Click Select. The newly added item will automatically appear in the Add-ons section of the products page, typically within a couple minutes.

Consider add-ons like:

While you’re busy working on your storefront’s seasonal visual refresh, don’t forget about the updates to make behind the scenes. These are levers that make gifting from your store easy and enticing while giving you a leg up on competitors.

When you set up your storefronts, you’re able to choose your shoppers’ default delivery selection — Send as an e-gift or Ship directly to recipients.

Whichever you choose as the default is selected automatically when a shopper goes to check out (with the ability to change it if they want to, of course). Pre-selecting the gift delivery method just saves your shoppers an extra click in the process and makes gifting a little bit slicker

Many Zest partners set direct ship as the default delivery method, but the Q4 holiday season is when you want to consider switching. Configuring your main storefront’s default gift delivery method takes just a few seconds, and the changes take effect in your checkout almost instantly.

When should you make the switch?

If e-gifting isn’t already your default, we recommend making it so once your holiday shipping window closes. Historically, if the shipping window closed and a gift couldn’t arrive by Christmas, that meant the end of a brand’s holiday sales window. But with instant e-gifting, gift sales and delivery can continue all the way until the day of a holiday.

For example, in its first Q4 using Zest, Milk Bar was able to extend its holiday sales window by 9 days, growing sales incrementally (sales that otherwise might not have happened at all).

To switch your main storefront’s default delivery method, go to Storefronts > Main storefront > Settings, and toggle off Set direct mail as the default send method. Click Save changes and double check your storefront to ensure e-gifting is now the default.

Seasonal discounts aren’t just a nice-to-have for shoppers — they’re expected. The average consumer is trained to look for discounts. And while you don’t want to discount so much that you lose money, a discounting strategy that works for your bottom line helps you stay competitive and gets shoppers in the door who will likely return to you for their gifting needs all year long.

Not sure what to offer? Discounts in Zest are quick to configure and edit, and here are some ideas:

Volume discounts have been proven to encourage larger purchases, and they can be a huge benefit to corporate gifters charged with finding great gifts while keeping the budget in mind.

With Zest, you have the power to swiftly configure volume discounts that meet your store’s needs.

To get started, go to Storefronts > Main storefront > Pricing, and the very first module you’ll see is for Product Pricing. Here you can set:

If you want a simple blanket discount in your storefront, set a percentage off under Product discount. Go to the Order discounts section to set a volume discount, which can be either a percentage or a flat dollar amount, that’s triggered when a shopper meets a specific recipient or subtotal threshold.

To make discount tiers, click the Add button. You can add up to five tiers of discounts per storefront. Click Save changes and your discount will go into effect immediately.

Adding shipping discounts to your storefronts works similarly to product or order discounts above. Scroll down to the Shipping Pricing module on your storefront’s Pricing page, and configure your discount.

You can choose to trigger a shipping discount when shoppers meet a certain recipient count or subtotal threshold, and it can either be a percentage or a flat dollar amount off. You can add up to five shipping discount tiers.

Want to stoke gifting this Black Friday and Cyber Monday? We recommend setting up some early bird or limited-time discounts on your storefront and encouraging your gifters to buy their gifts now and schedule them to send later.

Getting more people to place orders early 1) locks in their order with your store, and 2) spreads out the pressure on your team to process and pack large-scale gift orders. The more you can get done now, the less midnight oil your team will be burning by Christmas.

Consider a simple structure that drives urgency:

In Q4, there are many gifting holidays. Besides Christmas, there’s Diwali, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s Eve (some may even consider Black Friday and Cyber Monday their own kind of holiday).

Instead of cramming all your specialty gifts or bundles into one storefront, it’s not a bad idea to make a custom storefront for each occasion. This strategy not only lets you set specific discounts and offer niche products, but it gives your shoppers a clear place to go depending on the holidays they observe.

Plus, with data about each storefront available in your Zest reports, you can get a sense for your audience’s appetite for each holiday, which can inform products for the next holiday season.

Set up as many holiday-specific storefronts as you need by going to Storefronts and clicking Create storefront. From there you can name it, add holiday-specific branding, toss in special products, and more.

New to Zest this holiday season is the Visibility feature.

Toggle it on, and your storefront will be instantly readable by bots. Similar to the rest of your ecommerce site, bots can crawl your pages and products to surface them in search engine results and AI conversations.

Make your main storefront more visible to search by going to Storefronts > Main storefront > Settings, clicking the toggle beside Allow search engines and AI to access this storefront?, and clicking Save changes.

Tips for an SEO and AEO boost:

The AI Assistant in Zest has access to your storefronts (in addition to your concierge projects), so when you’re feeling crunched for time or simply want to offload the more tedious tasks this holiday season, help is as easy as firing up a chat.

The Assistant is a powerful helper baked into the Zest Partners Portal. Our team is working hard to continue improving the Assistant and expanding its surface area so it can help you do pretty much any task you need so you can spend less time toiling in the nitty gritty and more time finding gifters and expanding this channel.

The Assistant can do a lot, so you might not know where to start or what to ask. When it comes to getting your storefronts in top shape for the holiday rush, we recommend asking it to help with some of these tasks:

Not sure if the Assistant can field a request? Just ask!