Prepare your new Online Store for the first Holiday Season

If you have just built your online store in the past year, you want to take advantage of the holiday season to bring in more traffic to your business. With the skyrocketing online sales during the largest spending season of the year, you need to ensure your e-commerce site is ready.

Use these tips to prep your e-commerce site and watch your online business grow this holiday season;

1. Review your hosting plan. Ensure your hosting plan is ready to handle the amount of traffic you anticipate on your website. Consult your web host to make sure your site remains up and running to prevent any downtime-related issues during the holiday sales. If you are not satisfied with your current hosting plan, your best bet would be upgrading to a flexible hosting plan. Look out for a hosting package that provides scalable resources, tight security, speed, and improved performance to keep up with the holiday rush. Consult our team of experts for the best hosting plan for your online store and make the most out of the anticipated holiday sales.
2. Plan your offers. After you have confirmed that your hosting plan is reliable, it is now time to hit the ground running! Get started on mapping out offers and promotional discounts to draw in seasonal shoppers to your online store. Lure new customers in with discounts on popular products, contests, giveaways, and holiday gift gifts. Make sure you offer competitive rates to avoid driving your web visitors away to other e-commerce sites. Create an inventory and take stock of your products beforehand to make sure that you have all the products you need for your offers to avoid a last-minute rush.
3. Optimize the on-site user experience. While exciting promotional offers will lure web users to your online store, you need to ensure they convert to customers. For a seamless customer journey that will lead to an increase in conversions, you need to ensure the site is mobile-friendly, with flawless navigation and a simplified checkout process. Speed is also crucial when running an e-commerce site. You need to ensure that your site has lightning-fast speed, especially during a big sale. Failing to optimize your site for speed will lead to higher bounce rates and low conversions.
4. Optimize product pages. Getting consumers interested in your products is only half the battle. Focus on converting traffic to sales by optimizing the product pages to get web users to the checkout stage. Ensure you include the relevant prices for your holiday offers, accurate product descriptions, and discounts. Also, have visible delivery guides and return policies to avoid losing your customers’ trust and confidence in your brand.
5. Marketing & Promotional activities. For customers to visit your site and take advantage of your seasonal offers, they need to be aware that they exist. Crafting a marketing campaign will get your online store and promotional products out there. Social media, email marketing campaigns, SEO, and paid advertisements are some of the marketing tools you could use to increase the reach of promotional activities. For best results, use metrics from your e-commerce site to help you guide on the promotional strategies to use to increase sales and conversions from your business. Create content that will get seasonal shoppers excited about visiting your online store and shopping with you. Include snippets of your exclusive holiday offers, such as product offers, package deals, and other perks in your promotional messages to create buzz and prep consumers for an upcoming sale.
6. Provide a safe shopping experience. Check for potential security vulnerabilities that attackers may attempt to exploit on your e-commerce site. Also, you need to be aware of any significant threats that may exist on your site so that you can be ready to handle them as they emerge. Ensure that you have the best possible security tools since you will be handling sensitive customer data such as credit card details. To keep your customers on your site, you will need to see to it that they feel safe and secure at every stage of their conversion journey. Ensure you meet all the security requirements for e-commerce processes so that all the data going through your site is secured and to maintain the reputation of your online store.
7. Test your e-commerce site. After you have mapped your holiday offers, checked your site for functionality, and crafted an effective marketing campaign, it’s now time to test and preview your e-commerce site. Preview your e-commerce site from multiple devices, test all links, integrations, and plugins for functionality. Test your website design for cross-browser functionality and mobile responsiveness. Finally, audit all your content for quality and make sure it is SEO-optimized to attract lots of holiday traffic. Once you have tested your website and everything is running, your online store is now ready for its first holiday sale.
8. Customer service. Your customers are the most important brand ambassadors for your products. Therefore, you should ensure they are satisfied with both your products and service. Prepare beforehand for the holiday rush and traffic to avoid compromising the quality of your customer service. Enable a live chat function on your site, contact details, or have a support email available for your customers to initiate contact when the need arises. Good customer service will guarantee consumers get a positive user experience on your site, which will generate repeat purchases and improve your brand image.

A well-executed plan to generate holiday sales can make all the difference between a struggling and successful online business. Take advantage of the holiday season to increase your sales, make a profit, and solidify your online presence. When done right, you might even turn seasonal shoppers into frequent buyers in the next year.