Tips to prepare e-commerce business for
holiday season
The holiday shopping season is fast-approaching,
and it is time to prepare your online business for
optimized performance, if you haven’t already.
According to the National Retail Federation, 20-40
percent of yearly sales for small and mid-sized
retailers take place over the last two months of the
year. What’s more, pundits predict a whopping 17.2
percent increase in holiday ecommerce sales in
2016, with consumers taking to the web earlier
than ever to start their shopping.
The following five tips will help you prepare for the
upcoming holiday season!
Merchandising
One of the most important planning steps for a
successful holiday season is to understand your
customers buying patterns and offering them
curated selection of products. It is very difficult for
buyers to find all your products and they may miss
out on a few interesting ones. Create special
landing pages with themes and pre-selected ware.
Use your page real estate to create banners about
these themes so that visitors can easily find them.
Invest in tools like “similar to your search and view”
so that customers can have a choice in colour and
variation. Create bundles with accessories or
complementary products like an earring with a
pendant or a mobile case with a device. This
makes shopping easy and enjoyable. Do not make
your site overbearing with offers as it may also
deter some customers. Highlight certain products
and product categories that can provide a wow
experience. Make sure that you show what is in
stock to avoid disappointment. Most importantly if
you are offering a promotion call it out very
transparently and clearly and do not try to put too
many riders, this may again create negative
perceptions about your brand and business
practises.
Conduct a stress test for your website
The holiday rush will push your website
performance to its technical limit; if you can’t
stand the pressure, you’ll experience downtime.
Check your infrastructure and capabilities for
astronomically high sales as compared to regular
week’s sales. One way to forecast is to look at
percentage growth in last year just before the
festive season and during season to predict this
year’s potential. Match your stocks with current
season trends. Services like Load Focus and Locust
let you swarm your site with millions of artificial
users to see how your server performs. If the results
aren’t good, talk to your hosting company about
increasing your bandwidth. Now is also a good
time to test your site’s load speed. Optimize your
images, clear up your database, get your hands on
the latest version of your theme, and you should be
able to give Santa’s sleigh a run for its money.
Improve Your Content
When buying online shoppers make their
decisions on a) the product information you
provide, b) reviews by experts or their peer
shoppers about the product and the seller. Hence it
is important that you have multiple product
images, videos describing the product, the right
product descriptions, dimensions and any specific
information that can be useful in buyer decision
making. The richer the catalogue the better the
chances of securing a buy. Also encourage your
buyers to provide product reviews as other
potential buyers tend to trust their decision and
inputs. Spend some time in the coming weeks
ramping up your content strategy, including
development of blog articles and social posts that
speak to the interests of holiday shoppers in
targeted markets.
Staffing
Many a time potential customers have questions
before they make their purchase. Be ready to
answer customer queries quickly. Even if you use a
reputed shipping company having the orders
ready for shipping is a time-consuming process,
especially for smaller ecommerce businesses and
hiring additional staff ensures that. Budget for
higher number of items that may require gift
packaging and adding special messages. These
are very standard requests from customers
shopping during holiday season. Spend time in
training the new staff on regular processes, create
standard operating procedure (SOP) manuals and
even try some dry runs to make sure that they
processes work in tandem. Define certain
acceptable benchmarks for your team to answer
customer emails, tweets, Facebook queries and
calls and make sure that they adhere to it. The
faster you respond, the higher the conversion rate.
Delivery excellence
At first make sure that you communicate clearly
on every product page about the time you would
take to ship the item. Many a time the supply lines
from manufacturers and procurement agents go
haywire during peak season. Make sure you have
them secured. Also work with your shipping
providers to find out if they have changed their
shipping time estimates. Present a true picture to
your customers. It is also advisable to integrate
with the tracking systems of your shipping
providers so that your customers can track the
packages till they are delivered. Create email and
SMS alerts so that you can communicate real time
with them.
The holidays are a busy time for small business
owners, both professionally and personally. By
planning your marketing activities now, you’ll
have more time to help your business be a success
during the holiday season.