It’s probably a little early for the Christmas jumpers and way too soon for the tree. But even though there’s still over 2 months to go to the big day, it’s definitely not too early to start getting your ecommerce website in shape for the Christmas retail rush.
You’ve probably planned your product lines and ordered your stock. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of preparing for the festive season. Here are our top tips for getting your online shop in ship shape for Santa!
Delivery Dates
Make sure you know what your Christmas delivery deadlines will be. Check with your couriers/Royal Mail and make sure you’ve got the deadline loud and clear on your website. The last thing you want is complaints as the result of someone not getting their purchase in time.
Promotion Planning and Creative
Get a plan in place with any specific promotions you’ll be running ahead of Christmas and get the creative (any banners and supporting social media or advertising assets) ready to go.
Get up to Speed!
A laggy and lethargic website will send your customers running straight to your competitors. In fact, 53% of mobile users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. 3 seconds! We’re impatient online shoppers.
Check out your own page speed using Google Page Speed Insights or GTmetrix. Easy fixes include ensuring your images aren’t too big, though a number of other page speed factors will come down to the efficiency of your platform.
We’re pretty fast, by the way. #justsaying
Iron any Conversion Niggles out
Have a good look through your Analytics and assess your conversion rate. For every 100 visitors you get, how many of them buy something? And how does this vary from page to page?
If you think you should be making more sales for the traffic numbers you get, then you might want to just check there are no really simple little niggles to iron out.
When was the last time you actually went through your check out process? Have a go on both mobile and desktop devices and check there are no obvious issues for users.
If you want to dig a little deeper into what users are actually doing on your site, tools like Hotjar are are a great option.
On Site SEO Content & Housekeeping
Your platform should take care of most of the technical ecommerce SEO considerations for you. But your category and product page content can make or break your site from an SEO point of view.
Do all your key product and category pages have unique, well written and useful content? Have you done keyword research for important landing pages like these and written titles and descriptions with this in mind?
Invest some time getting some of these very basic SEO content considerations in place.
Consider Gift Guides and Other Christmas Content
If you sell products that make great presents, then consider collating them by recipient and creating useful gift guides for your would be customers. And get any other Christmas related content planned well ahead of schedule.
And don’t forget January…
And once you’ve finished getting ship shape for the Christmas season, don’t forget to look ahead to January. A hugely important retail sales time, you don’t want to miss out.
