10 Tips to Optimize Holiday Sales
According to Shop.org, online sales are expected to increase more than 8 percent to reach nearly $105 billion this holiday shopping season. Is your website ready for the online rush? Below are 10 tips to help you get through the happiest, busiest time of the year:
1. Make sure you're optimized for mobile. While the growth of mobile commerce is skyrocketing, many shoppers won't complete their purchase if they're experiencing problems browsing or at checkout, which could mean the potential loss of millions of dollars in sales for retailers. If that does happen, maintain dialog with your customers through retargeting and emails for abandoned carts.
2. Learn from last year. Analyze metrics and results from your 2013 holiday season. Glean insights and apply them to your strategy for this year. Identify what were your winners (and losers) last year. Where were the peaks and valleys? What drove the most traffic and what had the highest conversions, as well as the lowest? Learn from the past and apply those lessons to 2014.
3. Ensure website scalability through stress testing. In the rush to get ready for the holiday buying season, it's extremely important to test and retest everything. Conduct stress tests to make sure your website, apps and e-commerce assets can handle any surprises that may come up. Expect, and plan for, the unexpected.
4. Automate as much as possible. In order to adapt to the influx of holiday traffic and ensure a pleasant shopping experience, it's important to automate as much as possible, especially credit card processing, authorization, fulfillment and shipping, etc. Just as important? Knowing which critical processes not to automate, such as A/B testing, synchronous testing, etc.
5. Manage inventory fanatically. Keep shipping times short and change advertising and promotions based on inventory. Furthermore, ensure you have the tools in place to be agile and flexible with the campaigns you're running.
