The holidays are just around the corner. As a result, consumers are increasingly turning to e-commerce to do their holiday shopping.
Are you new to e-commerce and nervous about the upcoming holiday season?
We’ve put together this checklist to help your e-commerce business drive more visitors to your website and convert them to customers once they are there.
E-commerce tips and tricks to get ready for the holidays
Create a content calendar for the holidays
Content calendars are great year-round to help businesses plan their marketing initiatives.
However, they are essential during the holiday season when you might not have time to work on marketing campaigns.
Your content calendar should include realistic timelines for planning and executing your content marketing campaigns.
Focus on differnent sales channels
The more people you can reach with your marketing campaigns, the more potential buyers you can bring to your site. Look for online marketplaces that sell your types of products, like Amazon, ETSY, eBay, and Poshmark.
Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even TikTok are great ways to connect with younger potential buyers.
You might also be able to use affiliate partnerships with influencers whose audiences are an excellent match for your products to find new customers.
Don’t forget e-mail marketing campaigns
While online marketplaces and social media are excellent sales channels, email is still king for connecting with people online worldwide. Therefore, it’s important to take your time and create effective subject lines with personalized messages that offer value to the recipient.
Segmenting your email lists is a good idea to ensure that your campaigns reach the right audience and do not go right to their spam folders.
Optimize your website
An optimized website might be the most critical investment any e-commerce company can make.
Good search engine optimization(SEO)
If your website has good SEO, it will appear higher on the search engine results page. This visibility makes it easier for potential customers to see you.
Many factors go into good website SEO. Google looks for the website’s speed, if it’s mobile friendly, and the proper elements on the page like keywords, alt tags, meta tags, and backlinks.
Speed up your website
When your website takes longer than a couple of seconds to load, the user will likely hit the back button. The same goes for filling out forms that take a lot of time to submit.
Good ways to boost the speed of your website include improving server response time, optimizing code, and proper image and file compression.
Optimize the mobile experience
Users are turning to their mobile devices to shop more and more frequently. Google uses the mobile version of a website’s content for index and ranking with their mobile-first index.
Responsive design is the easiest and most cost-effective way to optimize your website for mobile. However, depending on your audience, you can look at responsive design or a dedicated mobile website.
Load test your website
As your e-commerce business grows, so can the strain on your website. Therefore, it’s important to try and avoid any potential issues by regularly testing your website to ensure it can handle sudden surges and spikes in viewers.
Provide an exceptional user experience
A good user experience will convert website visitors into repeat customers. So let’s look at how you can make their e-commerce experience with your company stand out this holiday season.
Offer enhanced website search
Once a user hits your website, the first thing many of them will do is find and use the search bar. Sophisticated internal search engines will allow visitors to filter by availability, price, and size.
Simplify checkouts
According to Netsuite, almost 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before the purchase is completed. In addition, many carts are abandoned thanks to complicated checkout processes that frustrate the buyer.
It helps to remove potential barriers like requiring visitors to register before they check out. It’s also good to give them a functional back button so they can navigate back to your main site easily.
Offer diverse payment options
Customers who can’t pay with their preferred payment method abandon their carts often. Credit cards are still the favored form of payment for online shoppers, but more and more are looking to use peer-to-peer networks like PayPal, Zelle, and Venmo.
Digital wallets like Google Pay and Apple Pay encrypt users’ credit card information on their phones and are also growing in popularity.
Promote customer reviews and ratings
Online reviews and ratings can significantly influence a customer’s decision to purchase an item. Positive reviews can be a great way to improve customer loyalty and drive more sales. So getting them to leave reviews on your website or social media is critical.
With either positive or negative reviews, e-commerce companies must respond, recognize them, address issues, or answer questions politely and promptly.
Don’t overlook fulfillment
You’ve made the sale. Now you’ve got to get your product into your customer’s hands. Here are a few tips to simplify the fulfillment process.
Practice good inventory management
Modern e-commerce software and ERP systems make it easy to get real-time data on product availability across sales channels and locations.
Accurate inventory numbers make customers happy and can optimize a company’s cash flow while reducing its handling costs.
Offer free shipping and returns
Customers are expecting free shipping and returns from e-commerce companies more and more. So if it comes down between an e-commerce site that offers free shipping and returns, or one that doesn’t, they will often choose the one that does.
You must work with a parcel delivery company that can integrate with your e-commerce software to automate the process and lower the costs involved.
Have a great parcel delivery partner
Reliable delivery is a critical component of a consumer’s brand experience, so it’s vital to partner with an outstanding delivery service provider like CIRRO E-Commerce. CIRRO E-Commerce’s tech platform and shipping solution can integrate with your e-commerce store via API. In addition, their vast U.S. and international network ensures that you can get efficient, accurate, and cost-effective shipping anywhere in the world.
They offer a robust tracking technology suite to ensure complete package visibility for you and your customers.
Want to learn more about how CIRRO E-Commerce is a global leader in e-commerce logistics? Click Here to Learn More about CIRRO E-Commerce!
Start working on your holiday e-commerce plan today
More and more consumers are turning to e-commerce sites for holiday shopping. Therefore, getting started as soon as possible is crucial in preparing for the holidays as they are the year’s busiest shopping days.
Have a thoughtful content marketing calendar ready so you can promote to an e-commerce site using a variety of sales channels.
Optimize your website, so it shows up higher in searches, is fast, friendly on mobile devices, and can withstand the stress of higher traffic. Once a visitor is on your website, convert them into customers by making it easy for them to find and buy the items they want. It’s also a good idea to offer them multiple payment methods. Work with a reputable parcel delivery provider that can integrate with your e-commerce software and has a national and international network. This partner will ensure your orders are fulfilled on time, anywhere in the world Getting your strategic planning done early will make implementing it more manageable before the holidays arrive.
Interested in learning more about how CIRRO E-Commerce can help you ship your e-commerce small parcels internationally? Click Here to Contact Us!