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Holiday Season Ecommerce Website Survival Checklist For 2018

ecommerce website checklist

So the holiday season is almost here. You’ve chosen the products to display, the important ones need to be in the center, hosted by a reliable hosting provider, have the means to get stuff delivered, your website is fast, responsive but modern. You know how to manage customers and get more conversions and you now stand toe to toe with the best in the business, you’re giving them a tough time. But then, you wake up!

That’s the stuff dreams are made of right? But, there’s good news and bad news. We’ll start from the bad news, that is, you don’t stand a chance with the competitors who have been in this digital sphere before you right now. The good news is, we’ll help you make an impact because it’s never too late. You too can go through this ecommerce website checklist and make sure your website is the go-to place for the upcoming holiday season.

Plan Ahead

The foremost aspect in this ecommerce website checklist is getting yourself primed and ready for the holiday season; to plan ahead and make sure you know what products you’re looking to sell off and which of those are hot sellers. The holiday season means out of 100, at least 70 percent people would opt for buying stuff online so is your website ready to cater to all of them and all at once? Do you have the necessary infrastructure to deal with heavy traffic?

What’s more is that, do you know on what days will you be advertising the most and which products will be the center of attention? How much budget are you prepared to spend on marketing specific products? Have you seen how your competitors are dealing with the incoming holidays?

Ready, Set – Go!

The second aspect in this ecommerce website checklist is about being aware of how demands went sky high last year during the holiday season. If you have the experience you can use it to make changes months before and start selling right now. Beginning your holiday campaigns as soon as possible will help you gain traction earlier than ever and might also help you avoid cart abandoning which could serve as a double-edged sword that promotes profits and loyalty.

So the time to start advertising is now.

See: Top 10 Proven Ecommerce Marketing Ideas for the Holidays

Meet Demands Head On!

Meeting demands is something that is often overlooked during preparations for the holiday season. Those demands could be for products or even the website responding to the heavy incoming of traffic. Leaving the product aspect aside for sometime, it is apparent that the holiday season can have negative effects on your website in terms of performance and stability if you haven’t prepared for this. Apart from having a contingency plan, you need to test your website first before you load it up with attractive things to sell. What’s more is that you need to ask your hosting provider if it is not a problem to handle the increased amount of traffic. If handling extra traffic is not a problem, you’re in pretty good shape because you can then concentrate on providing a better user experience in terms of design and layout.

Be Smart for Smartphones!

An extremely important aspect of this ecommerce website checklist is knowing that more and more people are browsing online stores on their smartphones. This is an extremely important aspect of making sure your website does not lag or cause headaches for people getting into your store through their smartphones. Optimize your website for multiple smartphone platforms and provides the best user experience. All the options need to work without being laggy and unresponsive. The app or website should be quick enough for customers to make purchases quickly and seamlessly.

Create Great Content

This is easier said than done. Once you think you have uploaded an image, you need to make sure it is a good one, one that compliments and presents your products in an engaging and interesting way. The next thing is to create or write content that brings the user’s attention to the product and has a human factor in it. It should make the user feel it is tangible even if it is not. Opt for Search Engine Optimization on your website and you’ll bring users searching for a particular thing onto your website. Even if it is not the actual product, see what you can muster up in terms of attracting an audience, once you do, it’s up to your content to convert a visitor into a customer.

Send Those Emails!

Email marketing might seem centuries old in a smartphone run era. But don’t let that put you off by not using it to sell your products. You can still start sending out emails informing people about your products and the upcoming sales that you are about to put on your website for the holiday season. Design those emails nicely where you put links to products with “pre-advertising” prices to lure people in. Use clever tactics to get people in the mood and put links to your website so it is easier for them to reach out. You might have thought this tactic should not be part of this ecommerce website checklist but there’s a big reason it is. Since email marketing is subtle, purposeful, and used to target old customers at once and still yield results regardless of time and age.

Give Rewards

Giving back is something more than a quote or a routine but it is included in this ecommerce website checklist article. To engage more and more people, you need to reward the ones who have been loyal and even those who are new. You do this to showcase what you are about. You can give rewards through discounts, freebies and little add-ons that would compliment customers or thank them for being customers. This in turn not only motivates them to buy more but also, when they share their experiences, which they will always do, get more people to take interest in your products and services. It will, in turn, serve you, and them.

Give your Customers, Service!

Like every other customer service that might not be doing its job, be a standout and do yours. When people trust you with their money, they want feedback to go through walls and in this case, to make sure they are taken care of, you need to make sure your customer satisfaction is right up there. One of the best methods of doing this is to make sure your customer services department is prompt and always around to make sure there are fewer worries and hassles for customers to buy stuff from your shop. With the holidays season, customers are hammered with issues like shipping, products not meeting descriptions or wrong ones being sent. To make sure you don’t spoil your holiday profits and holidays of your customers, your customer services department should be there in case something goes south.

Share the Spirit!

While this awesome checklist would help you reap the benefits of the holiday season. Before you begin cooking up the best plan you could and start making changes to your website, you need to realize that it is about giving a great experience to your visitors that makes them want to be customers. Loyalty is something that tends to overlook price in some aspects. But that relies on the quality of customer services, financing returns, giving more flexible shipping options, etc.

It’s the holiday season! So make sure your website is up and running, primed and ready to take on the brunt of visitors so it responds to the growing demands of online shoppers. It will help increase profits while promoting loyalty.

Summing it all Up

We hope this ecommerce website checklist helped you bring out the best in your online store.

There are lots of things you can do in order to better understand your website’s shortcomings (if there are any) and make the needed changes to prevent your visitors from choosing other stores over yours.

Your competition won’t make things easy for you and to stand out, you need to be special in terms of either design, website performance, prices, and product offerings. Most websites that have good loyalty have higher prices but if you check those out, you’d notice the great experience they provide for visitors. Design, layout, performance play a pivotal part in making sure you have good conversion rates.

With this Ecommerce website checklist, we have jotted down the most important aspects of making sure you are a standout and prepared for increased sales in the holiday season. But, if you think we’ve missed out on something, please tell us in the comments below.

 

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