10 Tips to Prepare Your eCommerce Site for the Holidays

As discussed in Marketing Tips for the Holidays, the holidays are going to be different this year. E-commerce growth has been substantial and mega sales are going to be the big trend in 2020 as COVID-19 continues to affect families and finances. With that said, we can use every marketing strategy possible, but it won’t convert into sales unless we have a great customer experience on the website. Below is a list of important takeaways to optimize the on-page experience of your website.

1. Easy Navigation

Optimize your website and landing pages to be as transparent and easy to navigate as possible. This will help with it’s quality score and increase it’s chances of showing up on Google Ads that you have running, as well as enhancing user experience.

2. Update Creative to engage holiday shoppers

Use on-page promotional banners as a way to communicate special holiday offers, exclusive sales, early access, and shipping deadlines or guidelines.

3. Customer Support

Add live chat/chat bot features to communicate directly with customers to increase likelihood of purchases. This can come in particularly handy with big purchase items to give customer’s peace of mind with their purchase, as well as support brand visibility with great customer service.

4. Safety First: Secure payments and Fraud protection

Provide a safe environment to purchase through, using secure payment systems, address verifications, and alternative methods of payment through integrated third parties like PayPal. Security should be added to every touch point of a purchase.

5. Plenty of payment options

Provide multiple ways of paying including finance options, Paypal, Affirm, or your own financing. As well as secure credit card transactions.

6. Shipping and Packaging options

Offer convenient shipping options such as free shipping, quick ship, pick up in store, or curb side pick-up. Also, being able to pick out packaging can increase customer satisfaction and brand visibility. For example, with many families not being able to gather this year, having an option for gift wrapping or custom wrapping could be a boost of morale. Or, include a discreet package option for those that may have a Secret Santa gift. All these options create a personal experience for your customers.

7. Site Speed/Quick Load

Site speed is so important, for user experience, all channels of traffic, and SEO ranking. Your page load time should be under three seconds — any longer than that and you’ll be looking at very high bounce rates. You can use tools such as GTmetrix or Google Page Speed to check how quickly your site loads and what recommendations to act on, such as optimizing image sizes or reducing redirects.

8. Pop ups

During the holidays, the influx of traffic will be of those wanting to purchase and ‘window shoppers.’ For both, we would like to capture emails or other valuable user insights. These pop ups can be used as an opportunity to sign up and use the offer later in their shopping experience and place them on an email list. Also, this feature, will need testing. For example, timing is key, adjusting when the pop up appears based on shopper engagement habits.

9. FAQ’s

To alleviate customer service phone calls and inquiries, having a prominent FAQ section may help answer commonly asked questions by your customers (holiday themed questions regarding returns or sales). This is also an opportunity for featured snippets from an SEO perspective to add questions that users want and need to know, which creates brand visibility for the topic.

10. Blog/Gift Guides

Blogs can be used to stay relevant, up to date with trends, feature products, and feature helpful guides. Creating holiday guides will engage users with your products and also help them find something that they might not find in their own searches. For example, having a holiday guide for Mom, holiday guide for the kids, unique gifts, best secret Santa gifts, etc. can help create visibility (SEO) and engage with current and future customers. This is also a way to complement your email and social channel campaigns.

For more tips follow our blog or reach out to our Rocket Web team for additional guidance.