Is Your Web Store Ready for Holiday Shoppers?
If you’re expecting heavy traffic for your eCommerce business during the upcoming holiday season, you must be ready for it. If not, you – and your customers – might be disappointed.
Now is the time to test your website to make sure it performs to your expectations. Can you customers quickly find what they’re looking for? Can they shop your website with their mobile phones? Can they contact you easily? How smooth is your checkout process? What about payment processing – do you have a backup plan? These items, and more, are important to your success this holiday season.
Design and Speed
Shoppers spend just seconds deciding whether to make a purchase. Does your website load quickly, or does it make you feel like you’re in line at a crowded department store?
Mobile Shopping
Make sure your site is compatible with all devices. Using Google’s recommended Responsive Design Plan, your mobile store will automatically adjust to the sizes of all devices customers are using to provide optimal presentation. The design has the added bonus of a single cart, so multiple web sites are no long required.
This means a better shopping experience for your users, which can translate to more sales and higher search rankings.
Finding Products
Give your customers top of the line search capabilities with tools such as Facet Filtering. This is a powerful capability that helps customers fine tune their search results. An example of a search facet can be anything such as color group, size, manufacturer, price range, or whether or not a special feature is included. It enables shoppers to make additional selections within search results based on their individual interests, eliminating the need to sift through many search results.
Ratings and reviews are another must-have feature of every web store. You can even use them, along with other types of questions/answers, to interact with your customers and add content to your website.
Use real-time stock allocation so backorder notifications are presented as items are added to the shopping cart. This lets your customers know if they have to wait for something, or if they’ll get it when they need it. This is especially important for your reputation during the holidays. You don’t want to be the source of added frustration because you customer counted on you for a delivery, only to find out at the last minute that the product was out of stock when the order was placed.
Be Available
Be sure to display your phone number where it can be easily and quickly seen. If a shopper has a question or a problem navigating your site, you want to make sure you can help.
Easy Checkout
Keep your customers informed with shipping charges and estimated time for delivery. You don’t want to go through all the hard work of giving your customers a good shopping experience only to have them get stuck in the checkout process.
Make it as efficient as possible with as few steps as possible. Keep it simple and quick. Keep page and image loading fast so customers won’t give up on you because it’s taking too long, or because you require registration or want them to enter too much information.
Payment and Security
It can be complicated for any business to keep up with all the cyber attacks and payment fraud going on around us. It’s particularly tough for small merchants, but you must be vigilant.
PCI Security Standards require merchants and service providers that store, process or transmit customer payment card data to adhere to information security controls and processes that ensure data protection. Keep up with your PCI DSS requirements, have a security process and an incident response plan, and train your employees on them.
Abandoned Carts
A significant amount of website visitors don’t complete their transactions, resulting in lost revenue. Sending reminders to customers who leave items in their carts can help recapture lost sales. Thank your customers for visiting and include a list of items they placed in their carts. A promotion code provides extra incentive to return and perhaps add a few more items to the cart before checkout.
eCommerce / ERP System
After the rush is over, evaluate how your eCommerce system performed to determine whether improvements can be made, and keep watching the InOrder blog for more details about features that help you improve the shopping experience you delivery, while lowering costs and increasing sales.
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