July and August are scary for online sellers. Orders slow down, carts get abandoned, traffic drops. The temptation is to wait until September to regroup.
The problem is that September doesn't wait.
Those who use the summer slowdown to improve their store enter September with a store that’s ready to perform. Those who wait arrive with the same problems as in June, multiplied by the pressure of the season.
How important is September for an e-commerce business
Q4 starts earlier than you might think.
September is not yet the peak, but it is the month when customers return with real purchase intent, marketing campaigns ramp back up, and advertising algorithms warm up after months of low season.
It’s the month when momentum is either built or lost, toward October, November, December.
The numbers tell the same story: according to the European E-commerceReport 2025, European e-commerce reached a turnover of 842 billion euros in 2024, a 7% growth. And the concentration in Q4 is glaring: during Black Friday 2023 alone, the top five European markets - the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain - saw an average 14% increase in sales. The trend continued in 2024, with a 6.4% year-on-year increase in Christmas season orders, driven by the same markets.
The Swiss market follows the same trajectory. According to the annual study by the University of St. Gallen, Swiss online commerce has reached a record volume of CHF 18 billion in 2024, accounting for 17.3% of total retail trade, with 20.8% growth over 2021. During Black Week 2024, compared with a normal week, e-commerce transactions in Switzerland increased by 92%, compared with +44% for physical commerce. Black Week 2024 revenues were 10% higher than Black Week 2023.
Arriving unprepared in September does not just mean losing a few orders. It means not catching up before the train has already passed.
The six things you can't rush
During peak season, you don’t make major changes to an e-commerce store.
Every change to checkout, every test on automations, every technical intervention risks disrupting active flows, ongoing campaigns, customers in the middle of checkout. Summer is the only window in which you can work calmly and rigorously.
Here are the six interventions that require time, testing, and attention, and that, if delayed, will weigh on Q4 results.
Checkout speed and UX
Site speed isn’t just a technical detail — it directly affects revenue.
According to Deloitte research reported by Shopify, a mere 0.1-second increase in site speed increases conversions by 8.4 percent, with a direct impact on average order value as well. Google points out that a 1-second delay reduces conversions by up to 7 percent, and 53 percent of visitors from mobile abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Funnel bottlenecks can only be identified through detailed data analysis, not by guesswork.
Payment provider configuration
13% of shoppers abandon the shopping cart simply because their preferred payment method is not available. For stores selling to customers in Switzerland, local specifics (Twint, invoice, PostFinance) are not details: they have a direct impact on conversion rates, and the data speaks for itself!
TWINT now has over 6 million active users in Switzerland, with 901 million transactions in 2025 and is accepted as a payment method by 86% of Swiss online shops. Leaving it out isn't a technical decision — it's a measurable hit to conversions.
CRM integration and post-purchase automations
An order shouldn’t mark the end of the customer journey, not the end of a transaction. Follow-up sequences, reorder automations, synchronization with CRM: setting them up properly requires planning, not quick installation.
Email marketing performance data — automation at its core — speaks for itself: in the UK market, email marketing generates an average of £38 for every £1 invested; in retail and e-commerce, ROI rises to $45 for every dollar spent, the highest of all digital channels. And specific automations, such as post-purchase sequences, are the most profitable: according to Omnisend data, automated streams generate 37 percent of all email-originated sales, while accounting for just 2 percent of total emails sent.
Catalog structure and product SEO
Organic search generates 43% of all traffic to online shops, more than paid search, social media and email combined. Yet 70.5% of e-commerce sites are ranked 'needs improvement' according to Google Lighthouse metrics, and 86% of brands have an unoptimized internal link structure.
URLs, metadata, category hierarchy: these improvements take time, but deliver long-term results. But there is a newer dimension that few shops have yet addressed:AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization.
While SEO improves visibility on Google, AEO determines whether your products appear when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity what to buy.
Shopify has already responded to this change with Agentic Storefronts: product data is automatically structured so that ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI engines can find it and surface products directly inside AI conversations, with checkout happening without leaving the conversation. The condition, however, is that the catalog is clean, structured and readable, and summer is the right time to build this base.
Tracking setup and analytics
GA4, Meta Pixel, conversion tracking on Google Ads: without clean data, budget decisions in Q4 become guesswork.
Organizations that make data-driven decisions are more likely to acquire customers, retain them, and make more profit. Yet the structural problem for many e-commerce companies is not technology-every platform has built-in reporting tools-but fragmentation: data lives in separate silos between GA4, Shopify, advertising platforms, and CRM, without a unified view. The result is that dashboards show growing revenues while loyalty quietly erodes.
Legal compliance and shipping configuration
Terms and conditions, returns policy, LPD/GDPR compliance, shipping rates and zones-these issues rarely seem urgent until they become an issue. Among the leading causes of shopping cart abandonment are precisely unclear return policies and lack of trust in the site: two elements directly related to the the strength of a store’s legal and trust foundation.
Complexity increases when selling to multiple markets: different rates, OSS/IOSS regimes, local payment providers, Swiss nLPD and European GDPR are not interchangeable variables. Our approach on Shopify starts right here: the tax and legal aspects, because a wrong setup upstream blocks growth before it even begins.
How much does it cost to wait
According to the Baymard Institute, the average shopping cart abandonment rate in ecommerce is 70.22% (aggregate figure from 50 independent studies). And improving checkout usability alone could increase the conversion rate by 35.26% for the average site.
An unoptimized shop with a slow checkout, poorly configured payment providers or absent automation is not losing orders because of lack of demand, but because of problems that already existed and that no one over time had a way to fix.
In Switzerland, where consumers are buying online more every day and online sales have more than doubled in the past decade, the stakes are real.
So ... run the numbers for your business: how much is your Q4 worth? How much can you afford to leave on the table?
How we work at Ander Group during Q3.
Our approach to interventions on Shopify follows the same steps we apply to every project: first a full shop audit (technical, commercial, and compliance), then clear prioritization of interventions based on expected impact.
No endless task lists: you work on what moves the numbers.
Implementation is done in a structured way, with progressive testing before peak season begins in September.
Realistic time frames for a full rollout range from three to six weeks, depending on the complexity of the shop. Enough time to do things right, early enough to arrive ready.
Ulysses' case study shows what happens when you get to Q4 with a solid foundation.
Free audit: apply now
For the first 3 shops that apply by the end of June, we are offering a free audit: a concrete analysis of the current state, with a clear map of priorities for September.
Availability is limited because every audit is done manually.
Not sure where your store stands? That's exactly what the audit is for.
