Prepare ahead for some of your best sales events
I agree... November and the sales events that it brings seem like ages ahead, BUT many of our clients have already started to plan the development work for them. Moreover, the key findings we will present here don't apply solely to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc. Year after year, we learn new things and we apply them to help our clients achieve record sales.
??Offering a fluid, personalized experience is key. Use AI to recommend wanted products
If the sale is geared towards cleaning your stock from products that nobody wants, there is a great chance that you will anger your hard-earned clients. This is why personalization is a must-have on every website. Using a history of purchases, clicks, or visits to offer your customers a shopping experience that is tailored to their specific needs will surely turn your visitors into customers.
There are various solutions available, ranging from modules and extensions, to complex third-party platforms powered by AI. You can find out more about them in our comprehensive?blog article…
???For new customers, your best choice is to display best-selling or most trending products. This will inspire your website visitors and make them feel confident about their purchases.
??Start your sale earlier
The high influx of shoppers during sales events is notoriously responsible for shipping delays and website crashes, and this is also an important reason why some customers prefer to steer away from it. For this ones, start your sale earlier!
??Build a responsive online shop for any device
The majority of consumers use smartphones to check out deals and place orders. The solution is to build intuitive and responsive websites, which look amazing and work well on every device.?Consider investing in developing an app. If the budget doesn't allow it, make sure your online store works well on mobiles.
??How to beat the well established brands?
More than 80% of consumers prefer to shop from well established brands because they offer a more comprehensive product information, in addition to enhanced customer service, better prices and more personalization options. But that doesn’t mean that newcomers cannot offer the same things. So, connect with your customers, highlight your uniqueness and authenticity, enable product reviews and you might find out that you have the winning hand. You can have a look at our article explaining the benefits of having business and product reviews here...
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??Security, security, security
It’s a well known fact that these sales events are hot ground for scammers too, and with consumers choosing the benefit of shopping using stored card data, you will have to take proper precautions. Some eCommerce platforms are of course better than others, but the recommendation is to always have your online store updated to the latest versions, making sure that basic security best practices such as SSL certificates and a unique admin URL are followed, and the best security options available for your platform are deployed.
??Prepare to avoid website downtime
This can be a merchant's nightmare. And unfortunately, it happens every year to many, because the spike in visitors' traffic is so big, that sometimes, servers alone cannot handle it.
Over the years, our team has implemented and perfected a long-time proven solution - a custom module which generates a static HTML page. This brings the following benefits:
? No requirements for any PHP and MySQL processing. The page contains an index.html, CSS, JavaScript, and images resources and can be generated by running a console command. Products are selected from a specific category (in our case /blackfriday) whose id is passed as a parameter to the console command which generates the page. Because there are no MySQL or PHP processes running in the background, regardless of the heavy traffic, this page will be up and running seamlessly at all times.?
? The search happens on the page, it works via JavaScript and hides or shows product items when a customer types in the search box. The navigation menu is also on the page, and no MySQL call is executed.
??Make sure you streamline the Magento’s native Full Page Cache module by using the Varnish cache service for the frontend, and Redis cache for the sessions and admin parts. Rabbit MQ helps a lot for the correct administration of message queues in Magento.
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