The 2006 holiday season is fast approaching and retailers everywhere are scrambling to maximize this season's impact on their bottom line. As an online store owner, there are a number of steps you can take to ensure that your site is ready to attract and convert its share off the flood of holiday traffic.
Get in the Holiday Spirit!
Your customers will appreciate you showing your festive side this holiday season, so don't be a Scrooge! Liven up with your website with holiday decorations. Many ecommerce sites place some decorations online for the holidays and you can do the same. Remember Yahoo's falling snow flakes? Very cool. (GoECart 6 merchants have functionality that allows them to upload site templates to their admin panel and save them for future use. You can save up to 50 designs for as long as you want and you can quickly and effortlessly turn them on and off.)
Do you offer a gift wrap service? For the holiday season, you should. Many buyers will be looking to drop ship gifts to their loved ones. If you can't wrap gifts, you may lose customers to a competitor who will.
Online gift certificates are another item you should consider offering as they can be a substantial boon to holiday sales. A staggering 73 percent of shoppers surveyed by the National Retail Federation last year said they expected to purchase one or more gift cards during holiday season. (Using GoECart's Gift Certificates Module you can offer your customers rich personalization for both paper and online gift certificates with complete automation for their issuing and tracking.)
Post Seasonal and New Products Early
New and seasonal products should be placed online far in advance of the peak holiday season. This way, you can test product pages in advance to ensure there are no issues and that they have sharp graphics and copy that sells. You also want them to get indexed by the search engines with high positions, which could take anywhere from one-three months, depending on the frequency of spider crawls and the optimization of your site. So get a move on and post those products now!
Scour Your Site for Errors
The most effective way to check your site for errors is by using web analytics software such as NetTracker. The NetTracker software lets you analyze web logs and run a variety of analysis reports for a specified date range. You can use the reports to identify broken links, slow loading pages, broken image paths, and many additional issues.
Web merchants can also do some basic testing manually. Start by deleting all cookies and temporary internet files from your browser. Then, review your web pages one at a time. Are all pictures appearing? Are they the right pictures? Are some pages loading slowly? Is the page copy effective? Is it free from false statements and grammatical errors? Consider using a professional copyrighter to proofread and correct your content.
One of the most important areas of your site to review is the checkout process. Make sure it is free of all errors, in order to keep shopping cart abandonment rates down. (Note: One of the biggest issues that we see clients make at GoECart is that they place a heavy amount of negative content in the check out process, keep it positive!)
Merchants should also remember that Internet Explorer is not the only web browser! FireFox, Opera, and Apple's Safari have been gaining market share, so make sure you thoroughly test your site with these browsers too.
Plan Holiday Inventory Carefully
Make sure you have a well-thought-out plan for the amount of inventory you will be stocking. It is common for merchants to underestimate the amount of stock they should have on hand so you may want to consider setting up a drop-ship plan as a backup strategy. By the same token, you don't want to have a warehouse full of extra stock come January 1.
Count on More Customer Inquiries
Chances are inquiries to your customer service department will sharply increase over the holiday season, so make sure your customer service department is able to quickly and accurately address customer questions. Some data such as shipping timelines change during the holiday season so make sure that information is updated as appropriate, and be very careful with shipping guarantees. You can reduce shipping inquires by having your ecommerce solution automatically send all tracking numbers to each customer when their order is shipped. Updating your online FAQ page with holiday related questions can also reduce the number of inquiries your customer service department receives.
During the holiday season you are given a chance to substantially increase your customer base. Take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity! If the customer has a great experience during the holidays, they will be more likely to shop with you all year long.
Continue Web Promotions
There are thousands of ecommerce sites -- what is your holiday strategy for gaining online visibility? Companies should consider stepping up efforts for the following online marketing activities during the holiday season:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is defined as a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. This advertising method is known to be highly effective and produce a high return on investment.
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising is defined as advertisements that are displayed on websites or in a search engine results page when triggered by a keyword. Advertisers pay for people who click on these ads and enter their site. This advertising method is great for companies looking to quickly send targeted visitors to their site.
- Comparison Shopping Networks allow online retailers to list the products they sell in a shopping search engine. When shoppers search for the products they sell, their product listings appear in the search results. If a shopper clicks on their listing, the shopper is sent to the online retailer's store.
Happy Holidays
For all of us, the holidays are a very busy time of the year. However, with a little strategic planning and execution now, your ecommerce season could have even more jingle than Santa's sleigh.