It's already September. As crazy as it sounds, the holidays are just around the corner. With holiday shopping seemingly starting earlier each year, now is the time to make sure you are ready to capitalize on projected record online sales.

Following is a check list of things to consider:

1. Have you planned holiday marketing campaigns? Now is the time. You can bet that at least one of your competitors is ready to go with attractive marketing emails suggesting great gift items. When planning your email marketing schedule, consider the fact that most online orders happen during business hours. On the Pay-Per-Click front, expect and budget for campaigns to get more expensive as competitors get more aggressive. However, know what your maximum cost should be to still turn a profit and stick to it.

2. Are your suppliers happy? You don’t want to be stuck with orders that you can’t fulfill. Make sure your vendors or suppliers are paid up and willing to supply you with product. Watch your inventory closely and if you see an early hot seller, start talking to that vendor early so that you can get more products before inventory depletes.

3. Do you have ample printing and packaging supplies? You don’t want to be stuck where you can not ship orders because your label printer is out of ink. The faster you ship the happier your customer will be, and the more likely that they will order from you again.

4. Is your product catalog complete with attractive images and solid descriptions? The more information that you can provide and the better your images are, the more likely a customer will buy from you. It is likely that you will not have the time to enhance your product catalog once sales start booming. Consider creating a category called “Holiday Gift Items” or similar to make life easy for holiday shoppers.

Plan now and execute soon. It can be the difference between a good holiday selling season, and a record setting one.

In what appears to be a response to Google Sitemaps, Yahoo now offers a free site submission tool located here. Merchants can submit a top level URL or the location of a text file with a list of URLs that it would like included in the Yahoo index. By submitting just a top level URL, merchants are putting trust in the Yahoo Spider in hopes that it will find all pages and follow links to all other pages on that domain. While it requires more work, it seems that the safer bet is to create a list of all URLs on a domain, post them to a web server, and submit the location of the text file. Yahoo makes no guarantees against this feature, but there doesn’t appear to be any downside to giving it a try.

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