The 12 Days of eCommerce Checklist
With the holiday season fast approaching, it’s crucial to prepare your website with an eCommerce checklist. To make sure your eCommerce website is prepared for the holiday rush, we’ve compiled a list of twelve optimizations to help you navigate this busy time of year. From catalog optimizations to local listing updates, our eCommerce checklist will help ready your website for the holiday season.
Tip #1 – Improve Site Speed
First on our eCommerce checklist is website speed. Website speed, or website performance, is how quickly a browser is able to load web pages from a given website. Improving your site speed is important because the amount of time it takes for your website to load could be the difference between generating a lead or losing one. In addition, your page speed performance directly affects your SEO rankings.
Tip #2 – Update Local Listings & Google My Business
Local listings are business listings on directory websites that contain all of your business’s essential information. This information typically includes your business’s name, physical address, hours of operation, phone number, website, and customer reviews. Having a local listing for your eCommerce business may seem unimportant, but it has countless benefits. A local listing can actually increase traffic to your physical store, improve your website’s SEO, and provide easy access to valuable client feedback.
Tip #3 – Put Together a Product Feed & Turn On Shopping Ads
Product Feeds are structured files that consist of a list of products and their attributes. These attributes include price, color, image, and description. This product data is organized in such a way that a feed management platform, such as Google Merchant Center or Facebook product catalogs, can take in the data to display product ads. Ensuring your in-stock products are listed as such with a current price, relevant title, and relevant description can be the difference between a sale or a missed impression.
Learn more about putting together a product feed and turning on Shopping ads →
Tip #4 – Create a Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is simply a free item or service used to entice potential customers into providing their contact information. In order to receive the lead magnet, the customer must first provide their information. Lead magnets are especially effective as they can increase conversions, help you to build an email subscriber list, and improve customer loyalty.
Tip #5 – Make a Holiday Marketing Calendar
A holiday marketing calendar is used to schedule social media posts, email blasts, and alike marketing content during the holiday season. By creating a calendar with a list of scheduled posts and blasts, you can begin to think about the promotions and products you want to advertise during the holiday season. Holiday marketing calendars are exceedingly important to eCommerce businesses, as they help generate holiday sales and promotional ideas.
Tip #6 – Integrate Installment Payment Software
Installment payment software is the eCommerce world’s version of Buy Now, Pay Later– meaning that it allows customers of eCommerce businesses to pay for their purchases over time via installment payments. Installment payment software also offers a ton of benefits to retailers, including increased conversion rates and greater order size.
Tip #7 – Add Gift Wrapping as an Option at Checkout
If you haven’t already enabled the option to gift wrap, now is a fantastic time to do so. Upon checkout, many eCommerce websites offer the option to include gift wrapping before purchase. This means customers can choose if they want their product to be wrapped before it’s delivered. Having this option can be extremely beneficial during the holidays, especially for increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Learn more about adding a gift wrapping option at checkout →
Tip #8 – Implement a Retargeting Strategy
Behavioral retargeting, also referred to as retargeting and remarketing, is a digital marketing strategy in which brands “retarget” customers with ads based on their previous online behavior and actions. Customers commonly fall into retargeting audiences if they are previous website or page visitors, or if they have clicked on a link or liked a page, etc. Retargeting is important as it can increase conversions and is more cost-effective than other forms of advertising.
Tip #9 – Reduce Friction in Your Checkout Flow
The friction in your checkout flow refers to the obstacles or headaches clients encounter during the checkout process of your eCommerce website. Such obstacles could include things like slow site speed, issues applying coupon codes, or a lack of mobile-friendliness. Reducing friction in your checkout flow is crucial, as the difference between a purchase and an abandoned cart could lie between an effortless checkout experience and just one of the obstacles listed above.
Learn more about reducing the friction in your checkout flow →
Tip #10 – Enable Backorders
By letting customers still purchase out-of-stock items on your website, you’ll be able to decrease the number of sales lost to your lack of inventory. Although back-ordering won’t ensure that you’ll make up for all the potential sales you could have made if your items were still in stock, it can still greatly reduce the orders you would have missed out on. Backordering also gives your business a defined amount of demand to meet, and provides valuable insights on customers’ shopping habits.
Tip #11 – Optimize Your Catalog
When a customer arrives on your website, it’s important that all the information they are looking for is available to them. Upon opening your catalog, a customer should have full transparency regarding product names, images, descriptions, size, and weights, pricing, etc. Keeping this information up-to-date is crucial to your success. Customers need to know exactly what they are purchasing in order to trust your brand.
Tip #12 – Add On-Site Chat Support
Last on our eCommerce checklist is live chat. Live chat support is a form of online messaging that makes it possible for customers to communicate with a business’s customer service team. A great live chat experience can have all sorts of benefits for your business. It can not only increase conversions and decrease cart abandonment, but improve customer loyalty.
As always, Bytes.co is here to prepare your business’s website for the holiday season. Whether you only have a few questions, or if you want to implement our whole eCommerce checklist, we can help. Schedule a free website consultation with us today to get started.
