How to Better Retain Peak Season Customers

Inflation eased in 2025, but cost pressure for e-commerce sellers remained high. Acquisition costs climbed, margins stayed tight, and growth became harder to earn. That makes one thing clear: sellers cannot afford to lose the customers acquired during the holiday shopping season. In 2026, retention is the growth strategy.

Retaining holiday customers is often overlooked once January rolls around. These shoppers typically drive e-commerce stores to a surge in new customers by leveraging discounts and one-of-a-kind deals. While Black Friday tends to prove lucrative for online stores during the week itself, failing to retain those customers for months and years to come can leave businesses missing out on a really huge opportunity. Similarly, the Christmas holiday boom, while highly profitable, is often a double-edged sword, leading to a flood of returns and customer questions that strain support teams and quietly chip away at profits as retailers struggle to keep up.

​The good news? It doesn't have to be this way. With some tweaks to strategy, customers who shop during the holiday season can be transformed into a loyal customer base that keeps coming back. Not only does 40 percent of online store revenue come from loyal customers, but customers spend 306 percent more over their lifetimes when they have an emotional relationship with a brand than those who do not. Therefore, creating a loyal and engaged customer base is crucial.

​Fragmentation Means Overcomplication

When Black Friday 2025 commenced, firstly, everyone rushed to grab the best deals, with the latest eDesk data revealing that $112 billion was generated in e-commerce sales — a 70 percent increase from Black Friday 2024.

But then, what always happens this time of year happened again: returns skyrocketed!

Issue resolution times are 28 percent slower between Black Friday and Christmas. Despite strong initial sales, slow resolution times lead to low retention, as customers expect speed and efficiency at every stage, from purchasing to receiving items to reporting issues.

The “slowdown” is caused by fragmented systems, where agents jump between tabs to find a single order. Increasingly, online retailers sell on multiple platforms, including Amazon.com, eBay, their own site, and more. Customer support messages also come in from an increasing range of platforms, including Amazon messaging, chat tools embedded in Shopify stores, support email, and phone calls, to name just a few. Managing this sprawl is expensive and inefficient.

​Fragmentation means support teams waste valuable time and money as they constantly switch tools. Problems also arise when customers tool-switch. For example, if a customer starts a chat conversation and follows up via email, they prefer not to have to re-explain their situation to the second agent. This is because 87 percent of customers value a personalized experience based on their history with the brand. A lack of a personalized, unified view also means two agents might accidentally respond to the same customer across different channels, leading to inconsistency and confusion — all deterrents to customer loyalty.

​Following slow, labor-intensive manual processing and shipping costs, eDesk also found that the January returns surge can wipe out up to 40 percent of an e-commerce seller's profits. January becomes the “profit killer” month, with a near-half loss. However, this is avoidable.

​The Omnichannel Solution​

The issue is too many silos; the solution is unification. More specifically, it involves integrating messages, order data, and customer history into a unified customer view.

​This ties into the crucial difference between simply having multiple channels (multichannel) and connecting them (omnichannel). An omnichannel solution directly slashes the time wasted jumping between platforms, following disconnected conversations, and overwhelming support teams. Now, more time can be spent on the high-value interactions that actually save the sale.

​For optimal efficiency, artificial intelligence chatbots can be integrated into a centralized platform to offer around-the-clock, real-time customer support across various channels. The most strategic integration involved using AI agents for frequent, straightforward, and repetitive queries. This should then free up human agents to tackle the more complex customer issues that require more emotional and contextual intelligence.

​A unified intelligent solution supports the support teams. It helps ensure customers are properly nurtured and reduces the risk of losing customers during e-commerce sellers' most profitable period. It’s already proven successful with businesses that have adopted omnichannel strategies, achieving 91 percent higher year-over-year customer retention rates.

​The goal of modern customer service is seamless continuity. It’s simply no longer affordable to let messages and data scatter across siloed tools. Instead, sellers must be ready on every platform, whether that be via chat, email or phone. They need to be everywhere at once! And as magical as that may sound, it’s all possible with the integration of technology today, particularly with AI agents capable of picking up basic queries.

​The days of huge profit drops following the November-December highs are finally being addressed; e-commerce teams can enter the new year with a much greater chance of customer loyalty and the ability to thrive consistently in the months and years to follow.

Gareth Cummings is CEO of eDesk, the AI-powered helpdesk solution for e-commerce sellers.