eCommerce Success This Holiday Season

Written your Christmas list yet? Have you got your slippers on now and holding a glass of something mulled and relaxing, anticipating a well-earned rest for your eCommerce Holiday? Or have you got your skates on and geared up for some seasonal smashing of traditional targets? With any luck, get the success factors lined up and there’ll be time to put your feet up as well as celebrating some fantastic festive eCommerce sales figures. Here are a few ideas.

First of all, get the basics in order. Downtime over the holiday period costs eCommerce businesses an average of many thousands of dollars. With that extra gift shopping traffic on your site, you’ll want to be prepared by optimising load speeds and making sure you have enough capacity. Monitor performance so you don’t get any nasty shocks. While you’re doing your online housekeeping, make sure you remove any sold out products from your eCommerce Holiday PPC campaigns.

You’ll want to put a halt on A/B testing for the holiday season as the results will be skewed and it’s likely that what you really wanted to test won’t be getting tested (e.g. how people view your site on an average day with no particular incentive to buy – hint: December is NOT that time!).

Remember that some marketing strategies need to be tweaked at this time of year. Your nifty ability to track previous orders and suggest recommendations won’t be much use if you’re tracking a shopping behaviour that’s actually for relatives with wish lists that will be redundant to you after Christmas. Other tricks need to change too. Email retargeting is worth intensifying over the eCommerce Holiday period, so that if you’d normally send a message about an abandoned trolley after a week, it may be worth changing that to just a couple of days. Make the discount worthwhile returning for, and you’ll probably get more than your usual success from follow-up emails.

Some things go without saying. Optimise for mobile devices – duh! And make sure your site will remember a customer’s cart contents even if they leave for an hour or a few days. Play your cards right and the ho ho holidays should be an eCommerce fest!