Choosing an LMS for Retail: 10 Features to Look for This Holiday Season

Dec 11, 2025 | Articles, Employee Training and Employee Experience Design, Onboarding, Sales Training

Key Takeaways: 

  • The holiday season is a critical and stressful time for retailers, with high sales projections and immediate support demands for an influx of customers, products, and temporary staff.
  • A Learning Management System (LMS) is essential for retailers to manage training across distributed teams, ensuring consistent knowledge for associates, customer service reps, and warehouse workers.
  • To speed up onboarding for seasonal hires, facilitate microlearning, update content quickly, and track compliance effectively during the holiday rush handle the holiday rush, a mobile-first learning platform is a must.
  • A Litmos case study with European auto retailer, Arnold Clark, illustrates how implementing an LMS can lead to significantly increased learner engagement and improved performance across retail locations, proving the long-term value of an LMS.

It’s the most stressful time of the year!

New products are dropping, 

Locations are hopping,

And customers need more support.

You’ll spend your Decembers

With seasonal team members

While building your year-end report!

The holidays are an extremely busy time for retailers, and this year is busier than most.

Retailers have already seen a record number of Black Friday shoppers in 2025, and the National Retail Federation projects that holiday sales in 2025 will increase between 3.7% and 4.2% this year. 

To keep all the plates spinning at this time of year takes careful planning, and well-thought-out learning strategies during the rest of the year. Learning professionals in the retail industry need to have training content ready to support all their teams: from the associates in the stores to the customer experience reps handling support tickets, to the temporary workforce in the warehouses.

A retail learning management system (LMS) is essential for creating and distributing timely training to the teams who make the holiday jolly for shoppers.

Why Retailers Need a Learning Management System (LMS)

An LMS is a software platform designed to deliver, track, and document training courses and programs. For retailers, especially those with many distributed teams, an LMS acts as a central repository of all learning content in an organization.

Learning and development (L&D) professionals may use an to create customized courses for an organization, assign learning paths to learners, and track the progress of learners on required courses and modules.

An LMS can also be used to deliver just-in-time learning to retail associates in stores or warehouses so that they can learn using a mobile device without leaving their stations at work.

10 Must-Have LMS Features for Retailers

  1. Mobile-first learning for everyone: Frontline retail teams may be racing between customers, gift-wrap stations, and the glitter avalanche in aisle four. A mobile-first LMS lets them complete training exactly when they need it, without having to take too much time, away from the daily chaos of holiday work.
  2. Swift onboarding for the holiday hiring surge: When it’s time to open up seasonal roles, it’s important that training for your temporary workers is updated and ready to go. Look for an LMS that offers role-based learning paths, automatic assignments, and quick-start modules so newcomers can jump into the holiday rush with confidence instead of chaos.
  3. Compliance tracking that keeps your organization off the naughty list: There are a lot of rules and regulations retailers need to keep abreast of, including age-restricted sales, seasonal safety rules, crowd management. A good LMS handles compliance reminders and expiring certifications so managers can focus on actual customers rather than wrestling spreadsheets under fluorescent lights.
  4. Microlearning modules as refreshing as popping a peppermint: No one has time for long training marathons in December. Bite-sized, scenario-based modules deliver quick knowledge bursts that feel refreshing rather than overwhelming.
  5. Gamification that adds a spark, not a snowball fight: Training shouldn’t feel like a chore. Keep your team engaged with gamified learning. Friendly challenges or progress badges can help keep spirits bright, especially during long holiday shifts. Just keep it playful, not pressure-filled.
  6. Fast content updates for last-minute retail promotions: Things change fast at the end of the year. Your team needs to be up-to-date on the latest in everything from holiday signage changes to flash sales. Retailers need an LMS with content authoring capabilities that facilitate quick and easy training content updates and keep version controlneat and tidy.
  7. Multilingual support for diverse holiday crews: Seasonal teams are wonderfully varied. Localized learning materials that support multiple languages can help everyone feel included in the swirl of December instructions and store policies.
  8. Analytics that offer clarity through the seasonal haze: An LMS should illuminate what’s working and what’s not: completion rates, store-level performance, assessment scores. After the holidays are over, and it’s time to prepare your year-end report, you’ll be happy to have those clear training dashboards and analytics.
  9. Flexible reminders that sync with chaotic shifts: With schedules flipping like snow globes, automatic nudges help ensure training gets done without anyone feeling buried under a pile of notifications.
  10. Social learning that spreads good cheer across stores: A central hub where employees can share quick tips, ask questions, or celebrate wins helps build camaraderie across locations, even when everyone is knee-deep in holiday shoppers.

LMS Case Study: How Arnold Clark Transformed Training

Arnold Clark is Europe’s largest independently owned motor dealer. The company, which sells more than 280,000 vehicles a year, prides itself on its excellent customer experience. To provide the same high level of customer experience at every branch, however, Arnold Clark knew that everyone in the organization would have to receive the same consistent messaging.

At the time, the company wasn’t using a learning platform at all. The move to an LMS was part of a push to get everyone on the same page.

Arnold Clark turned to Litmos; the platform proved easy to use and was able to get the company’s global messages out to all staff at every location. The company immediately saw a 40% rise in learner engagement, as well as improved marks by salespeople on their annual exams.

A Retail LMS is the Gift that Keeps Giving

As the season speeds toward its finale and retailers brace for the final rush of gift seekers, returns, late-night stocking, and year-end reporting, one thing becomes clear: a strong learning strategy isn’t just a nice-to-have during the holidays. It’s a must-have.

That’s where Litmos shines. With tools built for fast-moving teams, effortless onboarding, real-time updates, and analytics that cut through the December fog, Litmos helps retailers keep their operations joyful instead of frantic. When every associate is supported, informed, and confident, the customer experience naturally feels a little more “holiday magic” and a lot less “searching for a mall parking spot in the snow.”

See how Litmos helps retailers deliver consistent, engaging learning at scale, season after season. Explore our retail training software today or see the magic for yourself with a free Litmos demo.