Let’s start with how lucrative the holiday season is for eCommerce businesses around the globe. Keeping the essence of vacation in mind, we have assembled this piece of content so that you, as an eCommerce site owner, can leverage the maximum amount of sales during this festive season. Here’s what you can glance at:
- To begin with
- Magento’s 2019 holiday guide
- Wrapping up
To begin with
Finally, it is that time of the year… And while consumers restlessly wait for this seasons, businesses both welcome it and dread it at the same time. It is time to now greet the fast-approaching holiday season.
Undoubtedly, it is the vacation season that accounts for half of all the annual sales that a business makes. But along with this, the holiday period is also responsible for a huge spike in traffic spike in the online stores. Accordingly, your eCommerce Magento store is not immune to this phenomenon.
Source: bpol
Likewise, while the vacation season is a great opportunity for online stores to reach out to their customers, the tiniest mistake, in the form of a lag or an outage, can seriously hamper any company’s annual turnover.
A popular research recorded that the holiday season eCommerce in the past few years in the US is around 64 billion USD. Well, these predictions are to be believed then the sales figure for this year’s shopping period will easily cross 1 trillion USD.
So in order to make the most out of this holiday season, businesses are recommended to consider all the stages that a product passes through before it lands in the customer’s hand. The two most important aspects over here include search and discovery.
Although the holiday period does guarantee more sales opportunities for online eCommerce stores, whether those sales will actually take place or not majorly depends on the following two factors:
a. The consumer’s experience in your store
b. The performance of your store
If your business, by any chance, misses out on either of these two dynamics, it will be difficult for you to yield the expected revenue this holiday season. Keeping this in mind, we are here to help you with the best tips that you can incorporate to optimize your Magento store for the upcoming holiday season.
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Magento’s 2019 holiday guide
To optimize your eCommerce storefront this holiday season, take a look at the following guidelines so that you can ensure your customers have a superb experience on your eCommerce platform.
1. Check the security of your storefront
Do not let an erroneous any glitch to take away your holiday cheer.
Now, because the holiday season leads to higher SEO traffic, the competition is widespread and cybercrimes are at their peak. Due to this, most of the eCommerce stores face the challenge of protecting their customers from fake transactions. Meanwhile, store owners also have to ensure that genuine customer transactions are not hampered during this process.
To ensure this, your team will have to make sure that your storefront is guarded by the best security measures. You can achieve this by running your website on the latest version of Magento. This process involves technical extensions such as PHP, ECE tools, Fastly, etc. If need be, you can also scout for some good eCommerce SEO services to assist you with this security measure.
Additionally, you can also use the security scan tool offered by Magento services as it offers optimum security for your store and promotes a safe shopping experience for your customers.
2. Optimize your site for a faster eCommerce experience
The most important characteristic to have a successful digital storefront is speed. If your website’s design is not quick enough to respond, not only will you lose out on customers to the competitors but your company may also incur heavy losses.
At times, the images that enhance your site’s appearance and prompt the user to buy the product may slow down your entire webpage’s loading time.
Therefore, it is crucial to consider image resizing so that your web pages can load as quickly as possible. Another way to speed up your website’s loading speed by utilizing the full page caching.
Using the Magento cache System, you can optimize your website’s loading speed. For this, you will have to enable or disable certain types of Magento caches.
Moreover, at times, you will also need to clean up the cache manually by selecting the cache management buttons to optimize your online store.
3. Update the latest ECE tools package
Taking care of your cloud infrastructure is very important. Consequently, you also need to ensure that your cloud environment is updated to the latest version of the ECE tools. By doing this, you will be able to take full advantage of all the developments that get delivered in the Magento deployment tooling.
The recent Magento releases have brought in some critical enrichments, such as improving the local development experience, speeding up the deployment of static content on the website, and integrating self-service capabilities for better productivity.
4. Don’t forget about the mobile version
Source: alliedwallet
Mobile eCommerce, also known as mCommerce, is all set to grow larger than life. Consequently, it has almost become binding for all eCommerce storefronts to have a mobile-friendly site to survive in this competitive market.
One of the best ways to opt for a mobile-friendly website is by making sure that all your omnichannel engagement templates are designed for the mobile version as well.
You can have an eCommerce development company to design website templates and wireframes that can easily fit the small mobile screen. This can be done so that no distracted shopper can discard the brand message, be it via email, social media posts, website, mobile application, or via live chat.
5. Make sure all your web components can take charge
When a shopper visits your store, he/she will expect a shopping experience that’s as good as what Amazon or Google provides.
To be honest, the cost of failing this kind of customer expectations, especially during the holiday period, can be huge. As per various reports, a user will abandon a bad site and jump onto a competitor’s website only after spending 2 to 3 seconds.
The usual concerns that can lead to a bad user experience include excess page loading time and a slow payment system. But did you even know that your Magento search can also be the cause of downtime?
To give you a gist, take this example:
On Black Friday, some of the customers literally experienced 3,000 search queries per second, and the peaks at that time had over 10,000 queries per second. These numbers are against the regular 700 search queries per second that typically occur on a normal day.
So, whether you handle your Magento search infrastructure or have a Magento development company look after it, make sure your system is ready to handle such massive load increases during the festive season.
6. Keep your inventory up to date
Source: ometria
Despite the fact that deliberately creating product shortage to accelerate the sales is a good idea, displaying products that your site won’t be able to deliver before the end of the holiday season will definitely cause leaders to bounce to the competitors. This tactic may also waste the screen real estate for products that will not generate any sales for your company.
Considering this, keep in mind that whenever you display products on your eCommerce store, you do not particularly render items that are out of stock.
Given that it is that time of the year, and you will require to update your inventory in millions on a daily basis. Make sure you have a large-scale agile development system so that it can quickly pick up changes.
7. Don’t forget to monitor your performance
When you are optimizing your entire store for the holiday season, make sure you keep a close check on the performance of your eCommerce platform. You can track your performance by opting for several tools available online.
If you analyze your website well, you will precisely be able to understand what your shoppers are trying to communicate with you. You will get valuable insights with regard to what they are looking for and what you are offering.
You will learn what search results convert the most and how people navigate through your online store. And with all this data, you can easily improve what you are offering to your shoppers.
During the entire holiday season, you will acquire new customers, all thanks to the exciting promotions, offers, and discounts displayed on your site.
So, before the holiday season knocks on your door, make sure you have everything planned well in advance and have required groundwork in place so that you can yield some excellent sale revenues.
8. Retaining the customers
If your visiting customers have a good overall experience, they will surely return to your store for more. So after all the vacation spirit gets over, you can carefully give some serious thought to what went well and what didn’t on your eCommerce store.
After that, you can start thinking about some long-term investment plans for a better user experience.
Research reports that every 1 USD investment in optimum UX (user experience) can yield between 2 USD to 100 USD return.
9. Creating new landing pages
Source: searchengineland
During the peak of the holiday season, the competition for traffic is the highest, so any opportunity to rope in more traffic on your online store is going to return some major revenue.
So, one of the options that you can consider is to create dedicated landing pages on your site that can combine relevant products from your catalog. These pages can further have short editorial content that can be used behind new paid keywords, email campaigns, or even paid ads. For better, this content can also be used to appeal to the shoppers who have already landed at your store to increase your conversion rate.
10. Backing up your eCommerce website
Backing up your eCommerce website is necessary to optimize your online storefront for the loaded season.
If you have proper backup management in place for your Magento eCommerce store, you can easily dodge all the time-consuming rollbacks. To get proper backup and management for your Magento ecommerce store , Hire Magento Developers is best option to choose.
One of the most efficient and cost-effective tools that you can rely on for such type of backup management is called Snapshot. By using this tool, you will be able to restore the backup data whenever you want.
Now, because the Magento environment solely installs the read-only files, if you use the Snapshot restoration, you will be able to bring the entire environment back in a very short span of time.
11. Make use of online videos
To improve your overall sales process, you can always choose to incorporate product videos. Once the customers visiting your website find what they are looking for, then they will click on it, so make sure you leave no stone unturned to sell that product.
Source: bossvideoplayer
Online videos won’t only give your visitors clarity and satisfaction, but they can help customers in making a quick decision to buy the product. Adding a video to your Magento website is very easy. All you have to do is get your YouTube API key. After that, you have to configure Magento, and then finally, you have to link it to the product.
Wrapping up
The holiday season is just a few days away now. Before it begins to set in, you, as a business owner, need to make sure that your online Magento store is ready to absorb the boom that usually takes place around this period.
In addition, this is the season where you not only make massive profits, but you also gain customers that may stay with you for life.
If all this sounds like a daunting task, then you can also scout for the services of a good, Magento development company that can assist you with all the preps you need before the holidays come up.
