The E-Commerce Basics That Will Help You Win the Holiday Shopping War

It takes months for retailers to get the right technology, processes and infrastructure in place to support the heavy workloads the holiday shopping season entails.

With the busy holiday shopping season upon us, there’s an opportunity for last-minute optimizations, adjustments and considerations to help you best prepare your e-commerce site.

Focus on the Basics

It’s too late to add new, cool gee-whiz features or implement new payment and delivery options. What you can do is fix the basics. This effort can make a significant impact on your holiday sales as well as the long term.

When it comes to the basics, it’s all about three things:

• site performance;
• customer experience; and
• business processes.

Getting these three basic e-commerce tactics right is critical to long-term commerce success.

A high-end fashion retailer that we work with experienced some amazing sales results during the week of Black Friday last year:

• 7 million visits in one day;
• four orders per second;
• 90,000 new customers acquired; and
• $25 million sales revenue generated.

What would happen to this e-tailer if its online store was unavailable for as little as one minute? It would lose around 1,200 visits and 325 orders; with an average order value of $30, that means nearly $10,000 in lost sales every minute.

But there’s more at stake; a poor first buying experience will affect customers willingness to return. That means for every one minute of downtime during the holiday season retailers can suffer:

• Revenue loss: no orders coming through.
• Loyalty loss: visitors experiencing downtime can be considered lost long term.
• Customer acquisition loss: marketing dollars spent on driving traffic to your site during that downtime is basically money down the drain.

Make sure to test your site performance thoroughly before the holiday craziness begins. It's better to have it fail when you have 0.3 orders per second than 5.4 orders per second.

Test, Fine-Tune and Test Again

When it comes to customer experience, set your focus on convenience and simplicity in every step of the buying journey. Customers should easily find what they’re looking for, and checking out should be like a playground slide — you should be out and away before you had time to blink.

There’s a ton of analytics that you can continuously look at to understand how consumers browse your site. But at this late stage you should complement this with qualitative research to capture last-minute optimization needs. Identify your “target buying persona” in your customer database and offer them a 50 percent discount on one order in exchange for input on what they find annoying during the shopping journey. The cost of this effort to keep customers content will be much lower than the cost to acquire 90,000 new customers after Black Friday.

Optimize Every Step of the Buying Journey

Walk through your business processes related to every step of the buying journey. Identify where you're dependent on external partners and systems. Load test not only your e-commerce site, but also supporting systems, such as payment engines, customer support ticket systems, and order management to ensure they're able to scale and handle the volumes you anticipate.

Study your process flow charts in detail and identify any steps that can be removed or accelerated to optimize the customer experience. Can you speed up the curbside pickup process? Add dynamic content to your customer service FAQs? Fine-tune order packaging?

Consumers today expect the same level of service and convenience online as if they would walk into a brick-and-mortar store. This may seem challenging, but the reward makes it worthwhile. Customers who experience a smooth and convenient buying experience are more likely to become loyal to that brand and come back for repeat purchases.

Looking and Thinking Ahead

The holiday shopping season, while critical for retailers of all sizes, is increasingly becoming more about the coming year than making the numbers for the present year. Fine-tuning your e-commerce site is a chance to heavily increase the number of customers in your database and build customer loyalty for a solid revenue stream and healthy returns in 2022.

Johan Liljeros is general manager and senior commerce advisor, North America, at Avensia. Johan Sommar is Avensia’s chief strategist. Through a combination of technical and strategic business expertise, Avensia helps B-to-C and B-to-B customers accelerate their growth and become even more successful in their day-to-day business through next-level digital commerce.