The highest point every year for online shopping is during the holiday season. The holiday season is a great time for strengthening your online presence and engaging your online audience. It is important to make sure you and your business are prepared for the holidays.
1) Create a holiday atmosphere
Creating a holiday atmosphere on your website can immediately get your visitors interested. A few ways to do achieve a holiday atmosphere is by changing your store’s design theme using holiday colors, changing the website logo to make it more festive or highlighting holiday offers on your homepage. Use updated images to reflect the season or change up some of your heading fonts to a more festive font. Be sure your website looks great – on all devices.
2) Have a secure website
Having a secure website is very important for online shoppers. Customers are entering credit card information and they trust that your website is secure so their information isn’t spread around the internet. The holidays are a busy time for hackers as well as shoppers; these hackers know that sites may be vulnerable and they try their best to hack your site. You will sell more products to your customers when they know that your website is secure (SSL compliant). Side note, Google now ranks SSL compliant sites better for SEO.
3) Speed matters
Customers are impatient. 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. Pay attention to what affects your site speed and work with a developer on getting the load times faster. This will benefit you and your customers.
4) Focus on mobile shoppers
People are using smartphones and tablets for online shopping and research a lot more compared to desktops, especially during the holiday season, when everyone is on-the-go. Mobile conversion rates are still lower than desktop. This is because many online stores don’t provide a smooth mobile experience to shoppers. If you are not using responsive design for your online store, you are going to potentially lose thousands of dollars in sales this holiday season. Did you know, Google now takes into consideration how mobile friendly a website is when ranking it?
5) Simplify the checkout process
Usually, checkout processes involve several steps for the customer to check out. Some websites ask users for too much information during checkout or even if there are hidden costs that the customer didn’t realize before hand, they abandon the checkout process all together. Customers also use smartphones and tablets to start their research for gifts for friends and family. Usually, the items are purchased using a desktop rather than a phone or tablet because checkout is honestly, just a pain. Phones and tablets don’t have physical keyboards and it’s much harder to type in credit card information and details into the checkout. Also, there is a weaker processing power on mobile devices which means slower response times during checkout, which leads to abandoned carts. Simple is always better.
6) Use social media to your advantage
Social media is a great tool for businesses to share promotions and other content from their site. You can post products, deals. blogs, etc. on your platforms to engage with your followers. These followers will potentially become customers so it is best to customize your posts to each network to truly see the benefits.
A lot of eCommerce stores attract a higher rate of traffic during the holiday season compared to the rest of the year. So is your eCommerce site ready to handle the holiday rush? With the above listed tips, you can turn your visitors into loyal customers.
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