The holiday season is the busiest time for eCommerce retailers as buyers are always looking for online deals and offers to grab. eCommerce merchants must leverage this opportunity to create a buzz about their brand, add new customers to their list, boost sales and increase revenue. To catch the customers’ eye and drive traffic to your website during the busy holiday season, you must get your online store ready.
Competition will be high during this time, and you must offer something bigger than just the regular discounts to stand out from competitors. You must enable your online store to handle the increased visitor traffic and orders. Any technical glitch or delay in order processing will drive shoppers away to your competitor’s website. In this blog, we will talk about ideas to optimize your conversions by preparing your business for the most productive time of the year.
How to prep up your online store for the holidays
eCommerce share of the retail market globally remains high and gets a boost during the holiday season. To become the preferred choice for gifts, you will need to make the shopping experience easy, hassle-free, customized, and flexible. Given below are the steps necessary to leave no stone unturned to woo customers during the holidays.
1. Plan your deals and offers
The most crucial part of an eCommerce holiday sales strategy is deals and promotions. Offers are the main reason people shop more during holidays. You must strike the right balance between satisfying customers, profiting, and remaining competitive. It would help if you decided the following:
- What products to offer deals for, considering your recent best-selling items? You must also keep in mind competitive products and trending holiday items.
- Offer optimal pricing by considering the lowest price you can offer without compromising the profit margin. You must analyze the deals offered by competitors and re-adjust prices to stay ahead. It is better to prepare an acceptable price range.
- You must also recognize the best days to run deals- such as a day before Christmas, a week before Diwali, etc. These offers can also depend upon the items your online store sells.
- Consider the best places to advertise and choose the best social media channel based on your target customer base.
- Choose the right payment gateway partner to make the online shopping experience smooth and hassle-free for the customers.
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Prepare the content ahead of time
You must take care of your content creation before the holiday rush begins. Be it blog posts, videos, social media graphics, and other content, all of them take some time to create and must be ready a few weeks before the peak time. Having a stockpile of content can help you choose what to post, when to publish and how to adapt to changes. Some of the top viewed content during the holiday season are:
- Gift guides
- Product reviews
- Holiday-themed content
- Comparison charts
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Automate, wherever possible
In eCommerce, there are many tasks that can be automated all year round, especially during the holiday season. Automating critical tasks during the holiday season can save precious hours during peak sales time. What you choose to automate will depend on your sales apps. For instance, by automating social media marketing, you can post content automatically across platforms to let people know about new products, brands, and so on.
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Enhance Security
It is a known fact that cyberattacks are most common during the holiday season. Hackers will take advantage of the fact that eCommerce merchants are preoccupied with shoppers during holidays and try to perform malicious attacks. They may try to capture payment information from a checkout page or steal customers’ personal information. To prevent hacker attacks, you must proactively update your website concerning content and security. You must ensure that all plugins, extensions, and apps are of the latest version. No unnecessary information must be procured from customers, and all critical data must be backed up. You must partner with one of the top India payment gateway, Zaakpay, for availing the all the security features to complete an online transaction.
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Prepare for incoming traffic
Holiday shopping means increased traffic to your online store, and there is nothing worse than a site outage during these busy times. You must prepare for the expanded inventory needs to avoid long waiting times and frustrated customers. You must stock up on must-have gift items and top-selling items by coordinating with suppliers.
Your site must also be stable and reliable enough to handle the increasing demands on its infrastructure. It should always be up, irrespective of the web traffic. Also, ensure that your third-party integrations are up-to-date; otherwise, test them and ensure they can handle the load.
- Strive for a hassle-free customer experience
Test your site speed – You must ensure that your site loads quickly. According to surveys, around 70% of the customers say that the site speed affects their decision to buy from the online store.
Personalize the experience – Give your customers shopping experiences unique to them. Through customer and behavioral analytics, merchants can showcase products that can inspire customers and entice them to purchase. The same SEO data can be used for on-site searches so that the website results display the most accurate products that the customers are looking for.
Optimize checkout – You must create a seamless checkout experience by only having one checkout page, enabling guest checkout, and keeping the checkout process as simple as possible.
Offer several payment options – Partner with a payment gateway, such as Zaakpay, to give customers several payment options. You can offer them several payment options, including Credit/Debit Card, eWallets, net banking, and so on, to make it convenient for the customer.
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Prepare customer support
Shipping delays, failed payments, and wrong orders will ruin the shopping experience for both online retailers and customers. To avoid these mishaps, you must streamline customer support and train them to handle the excess load during the holiday season. Customers must be able to chat with your agents directly to resolve issues and queries.
The tips mentioned above can help position your eCommerce marketplace during the festival season on top of your niche. If you organize and prepare your online store by integrating with the right India payment gateway such as Zaakpay, it can enhance your credibility with the shoppers and boost revenue, especially during the highly competitive holiday period.
