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.