The holiday season is the most important time of year for most retailers. E-commerce store owners are no different. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the most profitable days of the year for e-commerce stores. In 2016, there were $3.45 billion in ecommerce sales on Cyber Monday alone. This is why it’s crucial to have a plan of attack, or else you’ll get buried by the competition. Here are some holiday-themed eCommerce strategies to give your store an edge this year.
Make Sure Your Site Can Handle More Traffic as a part of Your eCommerce Strategies
You’re going to lose customers if your site goes down on Cyber Monday. There will be other deals out there from other stores, so you can’t afford to have any downtime. Even slow loading speeds can cause people to abandon their carts. It’s key that you check the performance of your site before it sees an increase in traffic.
Getting rid of unused plugins and lines of code can help make your site faster. A content delivery network can also increase the loading speed of your site. Whatever measures you take, make sure your site can handle more than your expected traffic. You really need to include this in your eCommerce strategies.
Mobile Friendliness Isn’t Optional
A bad mobile experience can cost you customers. About 80 percent of people use their phone for making purchases. So if you have an impotent mobile presence, your customers are going to shop with someone else.
Choosing the right cloud based ecommerce solutions for your online store will ensure that your site has a professional mobile appearance.
Don’t Wait Until the Major Selling Days
People start their holiday shopping before Cyber Monday, which means you should start trying to sell to them before then as well. As many as 25 percents of consumers will start their holiday shopping before Halloween. If you’re not advertising until the end of November, you’re going to miss a lot of potential sales. Obviously, you want to address more attention to the most prevalent selling periods.
Getting out there early as a part of your eCommerce strategies, however, can reap huge rewards. It’s also possible that your product will gain some extra word of mouth if you start selling ahead of the typical holiday rush.
Budget Your Holiday Marketing Expenses
If you have already budgeted your holiday and pre-holiday marketing into your annual marketing budget, congrats, you’re ahead of the game. For the rest of us, it’s important to figure out how much you can spend ahead of time in order to keep yourself in the black by the end of the holidays. You should additionally break your marketing budget down into various expenses. This will allow you to run cost-benefit analyses on each area after the holiday season—allowing you to do better next year. By skipping over this step, you are risking your own profits. It’s easy to lose sight of margins when you see results from paid advertising.
Offer Free Shipping as a Part of Your eCommerce Strategies
Even if you don’t typically offer free shipping on orders, the holiday season is the time of year that can make it worthwhile. Studies show that as much as 90 percent of online shoppers say free shipping is the top thing that convinces them to shop more. That’s a powerful thing to offer your customers. And it would be unwise of you to not take advantage of this enticing metric during the holiday season when people are more likely than ever to continue shopping. No matter how you work it into your selling eCommerce strategies, the allure of free shipping will generate sales.
The holiday season can be a stressful time for everyone—but especially people who make their living from it. E-commerce store owners often make or break their year in the months of November and December. These holiday e-commerce tips will help your online store have a very merry selling season.
