The holiday season is a great opportunity for store owners to generate revenue and meet their annual profit goals. Every year the sales skyrocket during the holiday season and 2020 is no exception to that. Pandemic has forced people to stay indoors and get everything delivered to their door. Thus, the pressure is shifting towards the eCommerce stores.
According to Forrester, offline sales are expected to decline by 6.6% in 2020 and clearly, all those buyers are going to shop online instead. In order to make the most of this opportunity, you must make sure that your eCommerce store is well-prepped so that each buyer leaves your estore content and happy with the shopping experience.
In purely non-technical terms, you have to do to your eCommerce store what you would do to your house when a lot of guests are coming over. Decorate it, organize it, and most importantly, make them feel that you are ready for them.
Here is a list of things that you really need to do in order to glide smoothly through the holiday season.
Ensure that your store can handle traffic efficiently.
Buyers have a lot of amazing options in the holiday season. They won’t wait for more than 3 seconds for pages of your site to load. In order to ensure that customers don’t switch to other eCommerce stores, you must make yours super speedy and responsive.
You can take help from one of the many tools available that provide recommendations on what to change in order to enhance speed. Among other things, an important task is to review all the plugins and apps installed on your estore. Delete the ones that you can do without because loading these pieces of software can slow down your site.
The most important tip regarding speed and performance is to avoid last-minute updates or add-ons because such changes can be very risky when a surge in traffic is around the corner. Your site’s infrastructure should be ready weeks before the holiday season.
Load testing is a good way to determine traffic patterns and visit numbers. Contact your technology provider to get help in performing load testing before the holiday rush.
Order Supplies in Advance
You can’t generate good revenue if the hot selling items go out of stock right in the middle of the holiday season. You have to make sure that you have all the items you need. Consider studying last year’s sale data in order to determine what needs to be ordered and how much.
Waiting till the last minute to order goods can be very risky because it is very likely for the suppliers to go out of stock right at the start of the holiday season.
Offer Attractive Discounts and Deals
Buyers are expecting outstanding deals from you. If they don’t find your discounts and deals good enough, they will switch to some other store in no time.
They are a lot of ways to attract customers, for example, you can offer a discount on all the gift items or other holiday-related items. Another interesting deal is to offer free shipping for like 3 days only; such deals create a sense of urgency and buyers tend to fill up their carts right away.
Buy one get one free offer is also very attractive for people searching for gifts for their friends and family.
Make Check out Effortless
What excites you more than a customer filling up his cart and proceeding to the checkout page? It is a happy moment for the store owner to have shoppers on the payment step of their online purchases. However, if the checkout process isn’t simple and easy, this might result in cart abandonment.
Before the holiday shopping begins, it is very important that you optimize your checkout page. Especially for this time of the year, it is recommended that you enable guest checkout so that you don’t lose a generous buyer just because he hasn’t signed up.
Shoppers find it very exhausting when the checkout process is a tour of 2 or 3 pages. They prefer a minimalistic, super simple one-page check out that doesn’t take more than a few minutes. Another useful holiday prep tip is to add more payment options so that you don’t lose a customer who wants to buy from you just because he doesn’t have PayPal or doesn’t use Mastercard.
Perfect Customer Service and Support
With more people visiting your eCommerce store, you would need a bigger customer support team. Make sure you are able to respond to buyers’ queries instantly. It is very helpful to create an FAQ page so that every customer isn’t asking the same question from the support team. Update your FAQ page by adding holiday sale related questions and your return policy for the holiday season. Buyers find chat support very convenient and useful as it is an interactive form of customer support. Don’t forget to enable chat support on your site. Also, make it easy for the buyers to reach out to you by other means like email or phone. Update your contact information and display it clearly so that visitors don’t have to ‘look’ for it.