Top Christmas Ecommerce Tips

Once everyone is back from their summer holiday, Christmas will come around before you know it. Here are our top ecommerce tips for getting ready for Christmas. Mine Your Data - Your most valuable resource for deciding what you should do next Christmas is data you have from last year. Look at who bought from you and when in previous years.  Use this data to build segments for your email campaigns. Review what products you sold most of last year. Can these categories be expanded? Are there any categories that didn't sell well? Additionally, review which promotions worked the best; what times of year and what types of promotion were they?   Embrace PPC - You might not normally use PPC but at Christmas it can be a great way to cut through the competition and boost traffic and sales. Customers are more likely to convert at Christmas which means better margins than the rest of the year. Google Shopping feeds, Remarketing Lists and image ads can take time to get right, especially if you have to go through external developers and designers so give yourself plenty of time to set these up.  Optimise Mobile & Tablet - Sales made with mobile phones last Christmas grew 14% compared to 2015 and are set to keep growing. We would hope that everybody has a responsive mobile template by now, but are you doing everything you can to make it easy to buy from you on mobile? Adding simple payment solutions like Paypal can give your conversion rates a real boost.  Improve Conversion with Plugins - Basket Abandonment functionality and review software, like Feefo or Trustpilot, are proven to improve conversion rates. We've seen great results with both types of software. If you want to get the most out of these improvements before Christmas, you're going to have to get coding and testing soon.  Site Speed, Code Freezes & Hosting - Slow speed or site crashes can cause huge revenue losses in the lead up to Christmas. We recommend a 'code freeze' in Q4 to prevent any unexpected bugs and changes taking down the site during peak business. It’s also worth checking with your hosting providers to see how easy it is to scale up your hosting capability during peak times.  Find out more about us here.

Top 5 Christmas Ecommerce Upgrades

With the drowsy summer months finally at an end, it's time to gear up in earnest for Christmas. The festive season is a fantastic time to maximise on your revenue for the year, with most retailers making over 50% of their profit between October and January. However, that means implementing changes to your ecommerce site and processes now in order to make sure you’re 100% ready for the festive season. Here are our top five ecommerce upgrades to maximise Christmas revenue.

1. Generate more revenue with Google Shopping and Google Remarketing. Make sure your products are easy to find as people search for the perfect gift.

2. Maximise on success by inviting customer reviews. A reliable review can be the difference between a sale and an abandoned basket. 

3. Recapture sales through cart and browser abandonment emails. Approximately 2/3 of baskets are abandoned - but they can be recaptured.

4. If you haven't already then now really is the time to make the switch to a responsive mobile site. Over 50% of ecommerce traffic now comes from mobiles, but optimising your site for mobile is not as complicated as you might think. 

5. Upgrade to Universal Analytics and take advantage of the new demographic and ecommerce insights it offers, before acting on them.

Feel inspired? Need help with any of these? Get in touch by email or 'phone on 020 7492 1929.