How to Get your eCommerce Shop Ready for The Holidays

Is your eCommerce Shop Ready for The Holidays?

The holiday season is just around the corner and is a time when online stores see a large increase in their traffic, and retrospectively their sales. However, in order to take advantage of this, eCommerce owners need to prepare their digital storefronts in advance. In this blog post, we will be going over some tips on how to do just that and be ready for the holiday season!

1. Make Sure Your Website is Prepared

The holiday season is a time when online shopping really ramps up. This means that your website is going to need to be able to handle a lot more traffic than usual, as well as people are going to be looking at your website from a variety of devices. Adobe Digital Economy Index reports that in the US alone, online holiday sales from November 1st to December 31st are expected to reach a record $207 billion, representing a 10 percent upturn from 2020.

To ensure your site is ready for this influx of traffic, make sure to test and review your website before the holiday rush begins; which is right about NOW . This way, you can identify any potential problems and fix them in plenty of time, before there could be a negative effect. Be sure to optimize any images, clear any cache’s, and make sure all your plugins are up to date. You can use GTMetrix to test your website speed and get a report on how to fix any current issues on your site to help with its speed & performance.

2. Start Talking About Your Holiday Deals Early

Don’t wait until the last minute to start promoting your holiday deals. The earlier you start, the more likely people are to see them and take advantage of them. So start talking about them now, even if it’s hinting at them! According to Nation Retail Federation 61 percent of consumers surveyed in early November had already started their holiday shopping.

Start sharing about your deals a few weeks in advance and make sure to keep them up until the holidays are over. This will give people plenty of time to find and use your deals. Have a place that your audience can jump into an email list so that they are the first to know when you release your offers, and get any updates that you provide!

3. Offer Free Shipping

During the holidays, people are always looking for ways to save money; even if it may only be $12. One way you can do this is by offering free shipping on all order; of course you can limit it by destination – ie: Domestic US.

This is a great incentive for people to shop with you, and it can help you boost your sales. Just make sure that your free shipping offer is good for a reasonable amount of time so that people have time to take advantage of it.

4. Optimize Your Checkout & Abandoned Cart Flow

Go through your website just like a customer would. From choosing a product, to going to the cart, to going to the checkout. Is there any confusing? Any hang ups? Any opportunities you could use to offer an up-sell item and increase that customer value?

The goal here is to make the experience as smooth and easy as possible for your customers; so that they are more likely to complete a purchase. If you have a long and complicated checkout process, people are more likely to abandon their cart and never come back.

To help recover some possibly lost revenue, abandoned cart emails are a great way to recover some of those lost sales. You can set up an automated email campaign that will go out to people who have abandoned their cart, and give them a reminder about the items they were interested in. This can be a helpful nudge for people to come back and complete their purchase.