It may seem like the holiday shopping season is too far off, but the beginning of September is the perfect time to create and test you SEO and PPC strategies for the months ahead. In the online world, quite a few people start buying gifts in advance. If your site is positioned for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa shoppers before these seasons arrive, you can pick up a nice chunk of business from these early birds. Better yet, you will have a head start over some of the larger online retailers who tend to launch website specials in big blocks or wait for the “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” times to ramp up their spending.
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Here are a couple of things you can do today to get ready for the holiday season:
- Update Your Pricing. If your prices are significantly higher than other stores, then there may be an even bigger gap when specials come out. Conversely, you may be leaving cash on the table if your prices are super-low.
- Test Your Shopping Cart. Make a few test transactions, or actually buy a small item on your own credit card, and see if there are any issues that might prevent a shopper with marginal online skills from making a purchase. Carts that appeal to basic internet skill levels can make more sales and gain more loyalty.
- Consider shipping cut-off dates. Many people who run drop-ship ecommerce sites can have a high return rate if they don’t announce the last possible day some items can be shipped, and if it is possible to ship next-day, there is a sweet spot of last-minute shoppers who can enhance the profit margin in the last few days before Christmas.
- Send Coupon Codes to Past Customers. Whether you use email or post cards to send out collateral material, the cost of an online discount code is still usually less than the cost of pay-per-click advertising to new customers. The conversion rate is generally higher for these customers as well.
- Train Your Staff. In many ecommerce companies, everyone becomes a customer service agent during peak buying times. Training your staff in advance, and soliciting feedback from experienced employees, can smooth out some of the inevitable bumps in the road that come during peak performance dates.
- Prepare For Information Technology Issues. Do you outsource your IT, or pay a local agency to do it? Chances are, your professionals will be working on quite a few critical issues for big clients at this time. Companies with big IT staffs often implement a code freeze on sites just to make sure new bugs aren’t introduced that may take negatively affect the online store. Therefore, the best time to address any website functionality issues is today, before your programmers become distracted.
Holiday shoppers can be the difference between a year’s profit and loss for many online sellers as well as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Whether economic times are good or bad, there is still more shopping in this time period, and it pays to be prepared for all the things that can happen. There are always a few surprises with vendors, shippers, the weather, and other events, but they seem to become more concentrated during the hectic holiday season. By minimizing issues with your website and your ability to get orders out the door, your level of anxiety and exhaustion can be significantly reduced.
