Tips and Best Practices to Optimize Your eCommerce Store before Festive Season
The festival sales season is almost here.
People have already started looking for gifts and presents.
Not to forget, Diwali, Christmas and then New Year Eve are soon going to be round the corner. And this presents a HUGE opportunity for the eCommerce store owners to make more sales and earn revenue.
But:
- Are you up for the challenge?
- Is your website optimized enough to handle the huge influx of traffic in the coming months?
Undoubtedly, you don’t want to greet your customers with clumsy navigation, dull design, slow website speed, and more such issues.
This is why we are here to help you optimize your eCommerce store for the festive season ahead. Let’s get started.
First things first, is your website capable of handling increased traffic?
You will never ever want to crash your website during the peak festive season. But this is a common occurrence during the holiday season as the traffic spikes.
Thus, to remain on the safer side, it is highly recommended to check with your website host directly and free up any bandwidth if needed, to ensure a flawless experience.
Did you learn from the last year?
The best way to optimize your ecommerce store for the festive season ahead is to analyze the last year’s statistics and learn from them.
Analyze the reasons behind the success and failure of your last year’s campaigns, and examine the data to gain insight.
Here are a few questions that you must ask yourself while reviewing the data from the last year:
- What was your most popular product?
- Which days were the busiest with the most amount of traffic?
- What the average order value?
- Which keywords provided the most conversions?
- What all campaigns did your competitors run?
- What was the total revenue made by you last year during this period?
Is your checkout process streamlined enough?
You will find it hard to believe that the average cart abandonment rate is 70%. This essentially means that out of 10 visitors, only three of them place an order.
Is there anything that you could do to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate? Definitely.
It is highly recommended to focus on improving the user experience. Make sure that the entire checkout page is clutter-free. Further, avoid asking too much information from the customers at the time of checkout.
Keep the entire experience smooth and quick. You can also choose to provide a guest checkout option. Also, provide them with an option to save their credit card details for a quick check-out the next time. You might also want to auto-suggest addresses to provide a positive experience.
Also Read:
- Understanding Customer Psychology in eCommerce and Motivating Them to Buy
- Effective Ways to Enhance Customer Loyalty through Logistic Strategies
- How to Promote Your Products Outside Amazon/Flipkart
- How to Boost Conversions for Newly Opened Stores
Does your landing page reflect the spirit of the festive season?
This is the least you can do to spread positivity among your visitors and to convince them to make a purchase. A festive landing page also signals the visitor that you are all decked out for the season, and have something great to offer.
Thus, guide your web designer well-in-advance to create a festive theme background with bright banners. You could also choose to hide discount codes in the theme and ask your visitors to find out. This will create a joyous mood while driving better conversions.
What’s more, you should ensure that your landing page, product page, and all other pages are well-optimized for mobile.
Did you revamp your product pages?
While decking up the store is good and all, it is highly recommended to improve the navigation of your store as well. Make sure that your product images are convincing visitors to buy.
Ensure that the product image is clear ideally in HD quality and shows the product from varied angles. To help the customers in their buying process, it is highly recommended to add breadcrumbs so that they can navigate to the product hierarchy and history as and when needed.
Product pages tend to perform better when they are SEO-optimized with catchy titles and keyword-friendly descriptions.
To provide social proof, you might also like to provide ratings, reviews, and views next to each product. You can further assist the customer in finding the right product by providing them with the ‘recommended products,’ ‘similar products’ or something of that sort.
Does Your Website Have Live Chat?
Providing great customer support is important, this is why we will highly recommend you to add a live chat. This will help you in assisting your customers whenever they are in doubt. This will also reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate.
According to a study, integrating live chat with your eCommerce store brings a 38% rise in conversions!
Are you making the most out of personalization?
Believe us or not, personalization can help you win the race this festive season. According to Gartner, good personalization can boost profits by 15%. Thus, it is highly recommended to show relevant products to your customers based on their buying and browsing history. While suggesting products, it is highly recommended to keep their preferences, style, size, and likes in mind.
Finally, did you optimize your pricing?
While the optimization of the entire ecommerce store is important, it is even more important to optimize your pricing.
Make sure that all the items are priced well with a clear call to action. Put a button with text Buy Now or Add to Cart in a vibrant color to make it stand out.
You might also choose to compare two versions of a product with their cost. This will increase the sales of the lower priced item and will provide the needed exposure to the higher-priced item.
Your Turn
Now you know how to optimize your eCommerce website for the holiday season. All you need to do is implement a few tweaks here and there, and focus on customer experience.
What are your views on this? Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments below.
