How To Prepare Your Ecommerce Store For Festive Season

Tips To Prepare For The Festive Season

Just like any other thing, it takes time to make a foolproof plan for the festive season. So, here are the things which you need to take care of before the festive season arrives so that you can be ready for taking leverage of increased demand in the eCommerce sector.

1. Website Design

The design of your website plays an important role in its success. Just give it a thought that you visit a product page and the design of the page is not appealing. You are not able to find the information such as product description, colour options of product and size chart easily. Will you buy from that website or jump to an alternative site?

Most people would leave a website if the design of the website is not user friendly. Researches have shown that complicated website design is one of the reasons that people abandon their cart.

To give your visitors a great user experience, your website should clear CTAs for all pages. Each page of your website should have a clear message and capability to take the user to the next stage of their buying process.

While getting the essential website changes done, keep in mind the coming festive season. You can change the design of your website and give it a festive look such as something related to Christmas or new year. Remember you have to make the changes while keeping the design of the website user friendly.

2. Mobile Optimisation

Do you know that in 2019, one-third of all online shopping was done by mobile devices? This number is increasing with each passing day. Hence, if your website is not optimised for mobile devices then you must be losing a lot of customers.

To make your website mobile-friendly, keep a check on the following things.

• Responsive- Your website should be responsive for all mobile devices and screen sizes.
• Navigation- The easier the navigation of your website the better user experience it will give to your visitors.
• Fewer pop-ups- Pop-ups are great for desktops but when it comes to mobile, they can irritate your website visitors. Make sure to use them very strategically.
• Page layout- The page layout of your website should be such that a visitor can easily find all the necessary information and take the required action.

Check out this blog to learn more about how to optimise a website.

3. Check The Website Speed

Slow websites kill the user experience and increase the bounce rate of the website. For instance, the web pages that load within 2 seconds witness a bounce rate of 9% and on the other hand the web pages that take more than 3 seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38%.

Even a single second delay can cost you a lot of customers and of course money. Thus, optimise the speed of your website and see if your website is taking longer than 2 seconds for loading. If it is taking more than 2 seconds you should get in touch with an eCommerce development company and optimise the speed of your website.

Do it before the festive season because during the festive season your website may witness a spike in the number of visitors. This can make your website even slower.

Take the following steps to instantly see an improvement in the speed of your website.

• Optimise the images and videos uploaded on your website.
• Remove unnecessary plugins and extensions.
• Use a content delivery network
• Optimise the code.
• Get better hosting.

4. Search engine optimisation

You have a very user-friendly website with great design and lightning loading speed. But is it being found by your potential customers? That’s the thing you have to focus on before the festive season.

Optimise your website for the search engines so that people can find your website when they search for something relevant to your business. That is what we call search engine optimisation.

Let’s suppose you have a women clothing eCommerce store. Now you will have to be strategic and plan accordingly. Ask yourself the following questions.

• What keywords people would search for to find products relatable to my business?
• What type of content can attract them?
• Is my website optimised for such keywords?

Once you have got your answers, then optimise your website for such keywords. Back to the above example of women clothing eCommerce website. Now to find women clothes, people may search for the keywords like

• Women dresses
• Women tops for Christmas
• Women partywear clothes
• Women clothing festival offers and many more

The keyword research is a never-ending game, you will have to select the keywords that are most relevant to your business and have good search volume. Also, you have to check the search intent of the keywords.

For example, if you select the keyword ‘women floral dress’ for your bestseller product but Google shows blogs about the ‘women floral dresses’ in the SERPs then you will not be able to rank your product in the search results. This is so because the search intent of the keyword is informational and you need a transactional keyword for the product page.

If you are new to SEO and rankings, you can hire an SEO agency that can help you to rank higher in the search engines and earn more profits this festive season.

5. Create special festival PPC Ads

You need an effective advertising strategy for getting in front of your target audience. In today’s time, there is no better way of advertising than to use digital ads. As we are heading towards the festive season, you can start planning for special promotions for festivals. If you are giving any offers for Christmas or new year’s eve then you can target your potential customers through digital ads.

There are certain keywords that see a spike during the festive season. Have a look at the below example.

Here, you can see that the word ‘craft’ has searches throughout the year.

However, when you see the trend for the keyword ‘Christmas decorations’ it sees a major surge in the months of October, November and December. You have to find such keywords for your business and run ads. These are the keywords people search during the festive season.

That was all about the things which you have to do before the festive season so that your business and eCommerce website is ready to host the increased number of visitors.

Conclusion

These things will definitely help you to prepare well for the festive season. However, a lot depends on how you do it. If you are not familiar with the technology much, get in touch with RVS Media where we help our clients with web development and digital marketing solutions and enable them to increase achieve their business goals.