Low-Cost Tips to Boost Online Holiday Sales
Perform preholiday stress tests, documenting and diagramming all processes and job functions that are part of your overall e-commerce solution for identifying the possible points of system failure. Develop and document plans on how to correct and handle possible failures, and create contingency plans in the event a system failure occurs.
Site Performance
Do you know how many errors your customers encounter on your site on a daily basis? Unless you check web and database logs that show where and when errors occur on your site — such as during peak traffic — and track the impact each error has on customer behavior, you won't understand the impact systems errors have on your business.
Examples of systems errors include shoppers not being able to add items to shopping carts, broken links to landing pages within search engine results and system bugs. All of these errors can lead to site abandonment, which equals lost customers and lost revenues.
Regularly create reports and analyze error logs to understand where and when systems errors occur, how shoppers are impacted, and how to develop a plan on fixing bugs and the underlining issues that cause systems errors.
Site Search and Design
Site search can be a killer sales application, accounting for a significant portion of online sales. Tweaking the site search engine to enable suggestions of alternative products to search queries, perform spelling correction on search queries and enhance site navigation can significantly boost sales.
From a usability and site design perspective, retailers can quickly modify the checkout page to boost sales. Many retailers employ multipage checkout even though shoppers prefer a single page. Other “low-hanging enhancements” include moving important elements and information on the product page above the fold, having a lens feature so shoppers can zoom in on a product image by mousing over it, and installing a quick view with an “add to cart” option on the product search results page.
