Gear Up Your eCommerce Website For Hoilday Sale 2020

Have you missed the preplanning phase to kick start your festive season? The best time to plan your holiday season for the ecommerce business is the period between June or september. Well you are not that late to start. But acting fast on your ecommerce store optimization should be your priority now. There are loads of things to do to make this shopping season a flourishing one.

Giving a thought of taking a lenient approach for this lucrative phase might give a direct advantage to your competitor. According to Deloitte insights, Around 40% US adult shoppers said they preferred buying online in this pandemic. Moreover, 42%  of US online shoppers hinted that they would less prefer in-store shopping even after the lockdown restrictions are relaxed.  This indicates that  drastic shift in consumer’s way of shopping will be interesting factor to look at. This consumer’s mindset could impact the brick and mortars , but could a great opportunity to those running their stores online.

Lets check some interesting facts and stats about the holiday season and analyze the shopping trend consumers follows;

Statistics and facts of Holiday Sale

• Deloitte predicted holiday e-commerce sales to swell by 25% to 35%, ranging between $182 billion to $196 billion. This is year-over-year growth online of 14.7% in 2019, with sales attaining $145 billion
• According to emarketer, Ecommerce held 28.2% of total retail sales in holiday season, breaking the 25% mark for the first time. Total retail sales for the season reached to £99.26 billion ($132.33 billion)
• 2019 turned out to be the first holiday season to reach the trillion-dollar mark in retail segment. Both e-commerce and Brick-and-mortar retail spending attributed to $1.007 trillion. (eMarketer)
• Online spending in the U.S. increased by 13.1% with a total of $142.5 billion spent. (Adobe)
• Deloitte states that When asked how they’d split their holiday shopping, 59% consumers indicated they’d use the online shopping
• The holiday shopping statistics indicated by Statista state that, in 2019, based on the device majority of the ecommerce spending was done through desktop (60.4%), mobile (34.5%), and tablet contributing with 5.1% sales

Running an online sales is the most common technique and standing out gets more challenging in the market.

If you wish to grab a big piece out of it and maximize your profits, below are

Strategies To Prepare Your Ecommerce Store Upfront

• Know your audience – When you open an online store, you also open your customers’ demographics. But that does not mean that you should try to attract everyone. Organize your target audience carefully to know who you are marketing to. It can also affect the products you want to include in the online store.

• Get more technical – While it may be tempting to go through the development phase to start selling, but it could land your customers with package full of errors. Despite plan a schedule build the store and try testing it through angle. Make sure your payment methods are working correctly, and your customers receive an immediate confirmation email.

• Value you customers with surprised packaging – Determine in advance how you will package your products and order materials. It may be a good idea to ask for more than you think you need, which can help avoid delays. Protect your label printing methods and find the most economical shipping option.

• Sum up all selling channels – Since some of your local customers maybe switching to online shopping, make sure that product and prices descriptions are the consistent across all platforms. Make sure buyers are aware that taxes and shipping costs can affect the price.

• Leverage personalization – When your first customer clicks on your e-commerce site, they should have access to a user-friendly shopping experience. That is why it is essential to think about the customization options that they can access. For example, you can automatically generate a list of store suggestions when a user clicks on your store.

Moreover, one universal rule to lure your target customers is to become their preferred target first,

Offering a rich user experience should be your first target.

The current shoppers tend to be challenging to target due to their changing preference to what they need. Focus on what you sell and how appealing it looks to the potential customers in the first glimpse. Emphasize on best UX practices over exclusive deals. Shoppers do look for best deals and discounts on ecommerce stores, but this approach could drain their margins in an attempt to lure them. Attracting consumers should be smooth and user-centric, as this helps increasing conversion rate.

In the festive seasons, people tend to shop like crazy. This is all because of the great promotions and e-commerce shopping on almost all products. Often, e-commerce website owners find it convenient to make the maximum profit in the holiday sales. Keep in mind, there are ecommerce giants who are passionate about SEO for an ecommerce site. And these pioneers always win the race to get great conversions at festivals. Now it’s your turn to implement the tips to earn more than others.

How Ecommerce SEO Can Rank Your Online Store On SERPs?

Ecommerce SEO plays a critical part in keeping your site live and at top for your consumers.

Promote more in social media marketing

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter have the greatest potential to reach your target audience. After creating relevant themes, you can post to your products with a holiday theme as the background. You should continue to post related content that piques everyone’s interest and shows that you are a trusted authority.

Make sure your website gets crawled.

Work on parameters such as indexability, tracking, speed, content, layout formatting, and overall usability is the most effective SEO strategy.

List out sales-driven keywords.

Many searches for terms with the highest search volume related to a brand. Simultaneously, they look good in search results but are the worst-performing keywords that lead to conversions. The most specific term will take you straight to your product page, and searchers will find precisely what they are looking for.

And last but not the least,

Check excluded pages

While this list is usually made up of pages that you don’t want a search engine to look for, such as the shopping cart or the customer profile page, make sure that no essential pages are missing.

Some key takeaways,

Your site might get slow due to heavy traffic. Yes heavy traffic might sound to exciting, but can doom your holiday season goals, if your website isn’t capable enough to handle it. Keep your options wide open, no matter how big or small is your web traffic. Keeping your updated, backed and optimized is the best strategy you can deploy.

Typical events when your website is likely to crashed;

• Sudden traffic spike
• Product launch
• Huge sale

In this holiday seasons covers all three criteria and might leave you broken with a crashed site.

What best can your do to stay away from this scenario,

• Manage traffic inflow smartly
• Run load tests
• Downgrade your heavy UI functionalities
• Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Optimize platform configuration
• Compress data
• Use specific image dimensions
• Use Caching
• Monitor constantly

Security is one of critical parameter in this whole phase, as it direct links with the consumer trust factor. Customers trust you with their money, credit card and personal information. They need assurance of trust from you, so you need to make sure that your site is secured from hackers and verified for credit card transactions. Preparing your e-commerce site for holiday traffic can seem daunting at first. But if you take the time to plan it well and do it right, you’ll get great results!

Moving ahead,

This season is generally a good time to do business online, we all know the significance of holiday sales for ecommerce businesses. That’s when online consumers strive to find great sales, find better shipping offers, simplify and reduce the worry of buying gifts for family, friends and relatives.

Need more clarity on you ecommerce website development or integration with top ecommerce plaforms like Magento and Shopify?

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We at Best1Tech offer superlative ecommerce development solutions for all sized ecommerce businesses.