The holiday season is beginning, and both retail stores and E-Commerce websites are getting ready to see a massive footfall of customers in the coming weeks. It’s estimated that online purchases during the holiday season reached $135.35 Billion in 2019, with a growth of 13.2%. The focus on online shopping as against retail shopping would be more profound this year, due to the travel and social distancing norms. To equip your business better for meeting the holiday season rush, we have put together tips for the Holiday Season E-Commerce readiness, where we will focus on customer and user experience in the first of this series of articles.

The 7 Top Lookouts for Holiday Season E-Commerce Readiness

1. Evaluate your Website Readiness: Your website is the first and the only impression that online shoppers would be having about your business. It’s important that you revamp the look and feel of your website, add promotional banners, make it secure, mobile-friendly, and also work on the back-end of your website so that you can easily add products and fulfill orders. Your idea must be to give an easy and engaging experience for your customers, and make it easy for you to operate and update it. One good way to track your website performance would be to add Google Analytics to your website.
2. Create a Merchandising Strategy: Sales and customers in the holiday season are different, and so must be your strategy. You must create a well-defined and engaging selling strategy for the holiday season with a right balance of new products, offers, and promotions, so that you can attract customers to your online store. You can introduce new selling strategies such as free shipping, promotions, and coupons to attract and retain your customers.
3. Enabling Multiple Recipients: Your customers would want to send the same product as a gift across to multiple recipients, so it would make worthy for them if you enable multiple recipients for the same product, so that they would not need to order it separately. This helps create a better customer experience and helps make the ordering process easier.
4. Dealing with Abandoned Carts: Abandoned carts are one huge challenge of the E-Commerce industry, where customers abandon their shopping carts in the process of purchasing. You can use a tracking mechanism for abandoned carts, and send emails to the customer, offering them a discount if they proceed with the purchase. This helps in engaging customers, and also helps you cut down the loss in customers from abandoned carts. Magento has quite a number of popular extensions that you can use for abandoned carts, which also includes sending custom emails with built-in templates.
5. Have a simplified One-Step Checkout: Statistics conclude that one of the topmost reason for abandoned shopping carts is the lengthy checkout process that your customers would not be willing to fill-in. If your checkout process takes multiple pages and is slow in loading, here is the time for you to invest in a one-step checkout process so that it simplifies things for your customers. Magento, and other popular CMS systems have several such extensions that can be easily configured to give a simple checkout experience to your customers.
6. Improve your Customer Support:Holiday season are when you would see a huge increase in support requests, with refunds, product inquiries and cancellations being the topmost categories in support. It’s recommended to revamp your existing support channels, add social media support, ensure timely response and also add FAQ’s to your website. This would help in a long way in easing your support streams and making them more efficient and accessible to your customers.
7. Solicit Reviews: With the peak in sales and website traffic, you would often encounter customers who are pleased with the quality of service and are willing to leave a review. It’s recommended to solicit reviews from customers at this stage, as this would give you an opportunity to showcase your business in a positive light.

We hope that the above points would have helped you assess your website, user experience, and customer engagement to better prepare for the holiday season. Stay tuned for more updates on this series of articles on E-Commerce readiness for the Holiday Season.

How can Exinent help?

If you are interested to start selling online during the holiday season, we at Exinent are here to help. We have been into eCommerce development and support services for the past decade and have hundreds of delightful clients who have taken advantage of our custom eCommerce website development service. We focus on creating online success stories with a robust, secure, scalable, and customized online shopping platform that would help you get customers across various online platforms to your store. Feel free to Contact Us; now is the time for your business to get online and noticed!