Is Your eCommerce Website Ready For The Holiday Surge?

While the holidays are approaching, it is time for the merchants to be ready in advance to provide the best user experience for their eCommerce websites. Most US buyers purchase their gifts in advance, and there is a growing demand for online and mobile shopping. Due to the increase in traffic and purchases, most eCommerce sites are crashing, and there is a lot more for the merchants to do to reach the customers’ expectations. Read on the article to know how merchants can know if your eCommerce website is ready for the holiday surge when the customers are getting ready to flood online stores for holiday shopping.

To help the online store owners get ready their stores for the customers, we have prepared some essential steps to be taken by retailers to ensure that their eCommerce site performs well in holiday sales surge.

Essential Steps To Make Your eCommerce Website Ready For Holiday Surge

1. Site Performance Perfection

Checking site performance is crucial, and see if your eCommerce site can handle the increased traffic for the coming holiday season. Slow load times and poor site performance can hurt your sales and revenue. Never expect consumers to have the patience to wait for your site to load, especially during holiday shopping time. Ensuring your eCommerce platform is stable and equipped to meet increased demands is essential.

Speed and performance tests are recommended to ensure that the site can handle more visitors and transactions during peak times. Our professionals at Ayatas Technologies can help you test site speed and performance and make adjustments if necessary.

2. Customer And User Experience Audit

Regular site audit lets you check if all the internal links, graphics, videos, third-party integrations, on-site search, filter function, promo codes, website tools, and checkout pages are working. Your eCommerce site should always be user-friendly, functional, and up-to-date. All the functions need to be checked for proper functioning, mainly if you make changes for the holiday season.

3. Holiday Marketing And Promotions

It is hard to predict any customer’s mind and know what products come into their minds during the holiday surge. For the December holiday season, it is crucial to design a marketing strategy two months in advance. For capturing the market, you need to ramp up your marketing and promotional tactics to build brand awareness and secure an online presence.

A strong SEO and Social media outreach plan will help reach the targeted audience and boost your sales. A simple list can be designed to encourage the users to signup for more incredible offers that can be availed in the next holiday season. It is also suggested to incorporate other sales channels like Amazon or Facebook page and other social media to increase sales.

4. Ensure That Site Can Handle Additional Traffic

Every year most of the eCommerce sites crash at the peak of the holiday season. Merchants having eCommerce sites should take extra precautions to ensure that they can handle more traffic and not crash. Testing tools like Jmeter can be used for stress-test and checking with the hosting provider to ensure that the site handles all the traffic in the holiday sales season.

5. Always Match The Site Appearance With Holidays

Customers enjoy the spirit of holidays, and therefore your eCommerce store should also make themes or images that match the occasion. For instance, once the Black Friday sale is completed, the banner should be replaced by an upcoming event like Cyber Monday.

6. Optimize The Internal Search Engines

eCommerce sites are continually optimized for more significant sites like Google, Bing, and others. In addition to these sites, your eCommerce site should be optimized in internal search engines also. If internal search engines are left unoptimized, there is a chance that your products or site is left unnoticed by customers. As a result, your customers will not find the item they are looking for, despite your store having that particular product. In case of blank results, the search engines can be optimized to display alternative products that might interest customers’ minds.

7. Responsive Or Mobile-Friendly Design

With the advent of digitization, most of the transactions are completed on the mobile itself. A mobile-friendly website helps holiday shoppers to purchase items effortlessly. This means they shouldn’t have to zoom in and out or scroll around a page to find the button they need to click. The main component of mobile design is the checkout process, and it is most challenging to incorporate everything into the mobile design. The progress bar can be used to tell shoppers where they are in a transaction and how many more steps they have to go.

8. Shipping Of The Products

Once the order is completed, on-time delivery of the product is also essential. If you agree to deliver the product on a particular date and fail to do so, it can affect your brand image in a very bad manner. Also, be sure your return and exchange policies are transparent, easily accessible, and efficient.

9. Cyber Security

Before starting the holiday season, it is recommended to perform a cyber security check on your eCommerce site. The process can be used to review your IT infrastructure and website configurations to identify potential vulnerabilities. As a merchant, you’re responsible not only for safeguarding your business’s sensitive information but also for your customers’ data. A security breach can be a substantial legal issue and lead to mistrust among consumers.

10. Focus On Quality Content

For any eCommerce site, creating compelling content is most important for increasing sales and revenue. Content is critical for helping consumers find out about specific products, compare items within the same category and other products. So retailers can create posts related to various products, and quality content is vital for SEO. So you are in the way of creating an appealing eCommerce website that is ready for holiday surge.

Final Thoughts

Creating an effective eCommerce site for your business is not a normal feat in today’s competitive world. Many things need to be taken into consideration to increase the visits, sales and generate revenue. If you a merchant planning to start an eCommerce store, you need to take the help of a professional eCommerce web designer. Ayatas Technologies is an agency built with a focus on producing measurable results for our clients. Contact Us for more details.