How to Prepare your E-commerce Website for Black Friday and Christmas?
With Black Friday and Christmas just around the corner, peak e-commerce traffic is coming. Is your online business ready for the hustle and bustle of the holiday season?
Now’s the time to think about how to prepare your e-commerce website for the upcoming influx of sales. Avoid costly traffic damage and cash in on the holiday season by getting your platform ready for the digital stampede.
Our website development team at WishDesk has assembled some pointers to increase your website’s performance and usability during higher volumes. Discover what you can do to keep on top of your market and have more satisfied online customers.
Ways to prepare your e-commerce website for Black Friday and Christmas
Site owners often under-appreciate what’s at stake when web troubles occur on Black Friday and during Christmas. Common e-commerce site problems often happen because of a technical problem and are easy to avoid or fix. Nevertheless, failing to anticipate these issues ahead of time can have devastating impacts on customer satisfaction and your revenues.
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Establish analytics on your e-commerce website
The first thing you should do is to analyze your last year’s statistics. Use Google Analytics to see what’s going right and what’s going wrong with your website. Unwrapping both your success and failures right away will help you create a better e-commerce campaign this year.
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Boost traffic flow on your e-commerce platform
Make sure your e-commerce website can handle all the traffic. If your site crashes during the holiday season, it’s guaranteed that your online business will falter. Too many visitors at the same time, especially on Black Friday and before Christmas, can make your site go down. To avoid it, check with your website host and make sure your platform can handle the frenzy.
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Increase your e-commerce website speed.
Website speed impacts SEO, user satisfaction, mobile-friendliness, and much more. A slow website costs you money, especially during the holiday season. Is your site fast enough? You make sure it is by hiring a web development team for speed optimization.
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Ensure your shopping cart is user-friendly and encourages purchases
E-commerce shopping cart should show what the user is buying, how much it costs and what the next steps are. There are some simple steps to ensure that your basket is user-friendly and purchase-encouraging:
- make it easy to find
- combine mini-carts (appear in the sidebar or in the top right corner and include only the most essential information) and full-page carts (occupy the entire page and show more useful details)
- make sure that ‘proceed to checkout’ and ‘continue shopping’ options are clear
- shopping cart page should include payment methods and security credentials
- store the basket contents (with the help of cookies), so they are always available to buyers
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Optimize your e-commerce website for mobile
According to Statista, the share of mobile online sales on Black Friday has been growing steadily since 2014. This means that mobile will account for more than half of all online Black Friday orders this year.
An e-commerce platform optimized for mobile users is a way to capitalize and gain the appreciation and loyalty of this enormous community. There are a number of reasons why your website should be mobile-friendly.
In order to increase the number of satisfied users, it is vital that you improve mobile web accessibility. But what can you do to make your web store mobile-friendly?
- Make sure that your e-commerce website is responsive. Responsive web design lets you define control points (the points at which the page will change its display) for user screen resolutions.
- Avoid pop-ups. These annoying interruptions are hard to close on smaller screens. Visitors can easily get frustrated and leave your platform without ever coming back again.
- Optimize your images. E-commerce product image optimization results in better website speed.
Always double-check the ease by which you can browse your e-commerce website and make purchases on your online stores while using mobile devices.
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Arrange your e-commerce website design for the holiday sales
Deck the halls! Add some features to your website design which embrace and highlight the holiday season. For example, you can add a countdown module to create jolly anticipation and a sense of gift-getting urgency. You don’t have to be subtle either. Change your website’s header and prominently inform visitors about Black Friday or Christmas sales. Who doesn’t like snowflakes and jingle bells? Add some sounds and animation too. If your budget permits, a holiday redesign might prove quite successful.
To recap
Just a few easy steps will create a more pleasant experience and help foster that holiday shopping spirit which will keep visitors glued to your platform. Drop us a line and our designers will create an unforgettable website design for the holiday season and our developers will increase your platform’s speed and optimize it for mobile devices.
So much to do and so little time ‘til Black Friday and Christmas
WIshDesk is a web development company that has years of experience in E-commerce development and maintenance.
Contact us today to get your E-commerce website ready for Black Friday and Christmas.