85 steps to optimizing your customer’s mobile and online holiday shopping experiences!
The holiday season is the most revenue-earning time for merchants. Reports say that the season accounts for half of all the annual sales. So, during this peak traffic season, with rampant running coupons, sales and promotions, and rife competition, your job is not just to attract customers to your site, but encourage them to close sales. Therefore, to excel, every stage of a consumer’s buying journey, from brand discovery, site search, and engagement to checkout, secure payments, fast shipping, active customer support, and easy returns & exchanges requires attention from merchants.
As it polarly said, preparation is the key to successful execution- we've prepared a holiday season eCommerce site optimization checklist of 85 steps to get your site up and ready for peak shopping hours. So, without further ado, let’s begin.
A: Monitor previous website traffic to calculate coming season’s expectations
- Make a list of all your traffic sources (website, webstore, mobile apps, social stores, etc).
- Measure the traffic over the past six months (for each sales channel).
- Measure the load traffic during the last holiday season (for each sales channel).
- Analyze the year-over-year traffic growth, in percentage, between last year’s and this year’s demand (for each sales channel).
- Percentage increase in last year’s holiday season traffic and site traffic over the past few months (for each sales channel).
- To calculate this year’s peak traffic, identify your typical peak sales hour and review the load it places on your infrastructure (CPU, memory, and disk place). Multiply this metric by 3 for a reasonable 2022 approximation.
- Look at your Google Analytics, cart abandonment, and privy statistics from last year to establish a realistic expectation around traffic received, carts converted, and sign ups received.
Once you know how much traffic you might receive this eCommerce holiday season, it's time to invest in additional resources to meet the peak demand.
B: Improving Website Speed
- Check your eCommerce site’s speed for each page- product search, category list, product details, home page, carts, checkout, content, payment & shipping
- Check and improve the speed of your hosting provider
- Optimize image size across various devices
- Enable browser caching
C: Optimizing Homepage for the Holiday Cheer
- Mention the promotional sale with time duration above the fold
- Optimize your homepage title tag, meta description & images
- Include primary call-to-actions (CTAs) to make them prominently visible
D: Optimizing Checkout & Payment Experiences
- Allow customers to change carts on the checkout page
- Allow addition and deletion of products to carts during checkout
- Allow wishlisting items instead of deleting
- Integrate with popular and customer-preferred payment solutions (credit card, debit card, eWallets, cash-on-delivery, BOPIS (buy now pay later), Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc)
E: Optimizing for Mobile Experiences
- Pick a responsive mobile-friendly template or theme
- Match your mobile and desktop design theme
- Optimize pop-ups for mobile
E: Enhancing Product Page Experiences
- Allow users to filter search results as per price, popularity, new arrivals, relevance, color, size, style, etc.
- Allow keyword specific product searches for exact and relevant queries
- Auto-detect wrong spellings and still provide accurate results
- Allow auto-suggestions
- Check the landing page for product
F: Promoting your product with holiday-themed marketing strategies
- Audit your email segmentation strategy
- Create segmented campaigns for customers (mobile and desktop specific campaigns, product-specific campaigns, customer-specific coupons, etc)
- Run automated email campaigns (welcome emails after sign up, seasonal greetings, confirmation messages, early-bird offers, Black Friday sale, holiday invitation emails, gift cards promotion, abandoned cart emails, last-minute offers, winter deals, Christmas sales, product reviews, Happy New Year)
G: Providing Quick and Easy Shipping Solutions
- Review shipping policy with staff and update it accordingly
- Allow tracing shipping address of the online product on the map
- Offer free shipping on all products
- Automatically send order tracking links post purchases
- Add a note wishing them the best of holiday season using appealing gift card designs
H: Improving Returns & Exchange Experiences
- Choose an automated tool to ensure smooth refunds and exchanges
- Notify your customers over email about each refund step
- Give the facility of refunds into e-wallets to ensure faster refund
