In this article we would look into planning your holiday season readiness with E-Commerce readiness for shipping and fulfillment options. Since holiday seasons have a peak of sales, its quite essential that you offer you customers a wide range of shipping and fulfillment options, and also have an easy to use backend panel from where you can easily manage your orders. Here are a few tips that would help your store attract customers with the right shipping and fulfillment options.
Evaluate your existing Shipping options: There are three ways in which you can handle your shipping and fulfillment. Keeping in view the massive amount of sales that you would be seeing in the holiday season, its essential to consider your existing shipping options and check if you would need to change them for the holiday season.
- Handling Shipping and Fulfillment by an in-house team
- Outsource to a third-party service provider
- Use Drop Shipping as an alternative
Whatever option you choose, keep in mind the options that are available to the customer to ensure a seamless integration with your shopping cart. You can also consider a reduction in shipping rates, or a free shipping option for select cart orders to boost sales.
Enabling multiple currency options: During the holiday season, you would have customers shopping from across the globe, so it is advised to allow multiple currency options for payment. This would give your users the flexibility in paying in their currency, without having to check the current exchange rate. If you have a multisite Magento installation, you can manage the base currency for each website
Vibrant Packaging and Unboxing Experience: Your packaging and unboxing experience must match the theme and flavor of the holiday season since most of the products sold would be for gifting, so it’s advised to have a unique packaging experience for your products. You could have a holiday themed packaging, with cutout windows that allows customers to peek into the contents. Consider being creative with your packaging so that suits the contents inside, and experiment with a variety of packaging materials that will give it the unique look as a holiday season gift. You can also add an option to have the product gift wrapped in your shopping cart, use holiday themed packing tape, custom stickers, custom wrapping paper and also have an option of inserting a written note inside the package. You can also use environment friendly packaging and highlight it in your website, making it sustainable and easy to use.
Dealing with returns: Surveys indicate that 15 to 30% of purchases made during the holiday season are returned, so its advisable that you be prepared for the inflow with adequate return policies easily mentioned in your website. Many customers check for free return policy in the website while purchasing, so keep in mind to include that if it suits your budget.
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!
