eCommerce Holiday Sales: How to Best Prepare

The holidays are the busiest time of year for everyone, especially ecommerce businesses. Online shopping is more convenient, and shoppers can avoid long waits in lines and stand outside in the cold. In addition, online shopping is simply easier; instead of trying to find the perfect gift for your loved one, you can pass links to products back and forth to find the perfect gift every time. So whether people are shopping for hiking shoes or luxury items, online shopping booms every holiday season. Is your business prepared? Here are some tips to help you prepare for e-commerce holiday sales.

1. Prep your website

Your online store needs to function properly, so you must prepare for the influx of visitors during the months leading up to and after the holidays. Check your website to ensure you can provide visitors with a good user experience with easy navigation. In addition, your website should feature holiday-specific offers and products along with holiday messaging to grab your visitors’ attention as soon as they land on your site.

Of course, you must ensure your website can handle hundreds, if not thousands, of new visitors during the busy season. If lots of website visitors cause your website to slow down, you’ll lose out on sales. Additionally, if your website crashes because there are too many people viewing it, you’ll lose sales during the busiest season of the year. If you’re unsure whether your website will hold up during the holiday season, consider hiring a website developer who can ensure your website can handle all the visitors and sales. In addition, it’s beneficial to have someone on call if there are problems with your website during normal business hours.

2. Update product photos

Photos are especially important for ecommerce businesses because website visitors can’t touch the products to help them make a final decision. Therefore, you must have high-quality photos of all your products to facilitate decision-making for buyers. Ensure your product photos are professional and can showcase multiple angles to give customers a sense of what to expect when their gifts arrive.

3. Optimize your website

When people shop online, they often use search engines using keywords to find the right gift for their loved ones. Depending on how well-known your brand name is, they may also type branded keywords. However, in most cases, you’ll need to compete with several other ecommerce businesses for sales, so your product pages must be optimized to bring in as much traffic as possible.

The best way to optimize your product pages to ensure they’ll rank on search engines in time for the holidays is by working with an SEO agency. However, you can also use your website builder’s tools to update some information, such as product descriptions, meta descriptions, titles, and photos.

4. Use social media

If you have holiday deals, try blasting them on social media to bring more customers to your website. Social media also enables selling, offering you the chance to sell your products directly on the platform instead of asking users to leave the app to purchase products on your website. You can integrate your online store with your social profiles to make products more visible and boost brand awareness. You can also use social media to advertise your holiday offers and bring in more customers and sales.

5. Use email marketing

Email marketing has a high ROI because your subscribers choose to receive your emails, so they’re likely already interested in your products. You can start generating buzz about your holiday deals months in advance to inform customers about what they can expect. Consider crafting an email strategy for the holidays using marketing automation to cater to customers depending on their purchasing habits and actions they’ve taken on your website.

You should also be prepared with abandoned cart emails. Shopping during the holidays can be frantic for some individuals, so it’s expected that they may be shopping around to find the best deals and gifts. Abandoned cart emails remind potential customers that they have products in their cart and can continue the checkout process. In addition, giving your customers a deal for finalizing their orders can help generate more sales.

6. Run promotions

We’ve already mentioned that you’ll likely have holiday offers, but if you’re not planning on offering customers anything special, you might lose out on sales. Your online store needs to make an extra push during the holidays to compete with bigger companies, so a product drop or flash sale can help spark some excitement. In addition, you should plan to take advantage of anyone shopping after the holidays. Since many people receive cash or gift cards, they might be looking for ways to spend their holiday money, so having deals for post-holiday shoppers can help you take advantage of these types of shoppers.

Any type of business can offer holiday promotions. Remember, the holidays happen at the end of the year, so people will be looking for ways to improve their next year and keep up with their new year’s resolutions. For example, someone prioritizing sleep in the new year might be looking for a high-quality memory foam mattress, while someone prioritizing their health will shop for exercise equipment. Therefore, no matter what type of business you have, it’s likely someone is looking for a great deal during the holiday season.

7. Offer convenient payment options

Ensuring a smooth checkout process is key. If your checkout process is complicated or you don’t offer easy payment solutions, you could easily lose customers. Always offer multiple ways to pay, especially during the holidays. People shop on their mobile devices at any time throughout the day, so they might not always have access to their credit or debit cards. Instead, you can offer flexible payment solutions through digital wallet payments and Paypal or offer buy now, pay later options for large purchases. 

Wrapping up

Giving gifts is one of the most exciting parts of the holidays, so you must ensure your website is ready for the influx of potential customers. Providing a seamless shopping experience with deals and flexible payments will keep customers coming back for more. In addition, always remember to make a marketing push before the holidays to remind customers of any deals or offers you have.