Preparing Your Magento Store for Christmas
We’ve all seen it. Christmas is well and truly on the way. We’ve seen the frost, seen the freshly-scraped cars skidding around on the news and even sang along to the Coca-Cola advert (a-holidays-a-comin’-a-holidays-a-comin’!). In approximately 5 days we will be entering into that month again. December. The last one. Number 12.
We have all been through a lot this year, businesses have gone under, mortgages are harder to come by, prospective customers are staying in and saving what little money they have. However, you could argue that next year might be even worse. Budget cuts, VAT increases, education reforms (students being even more out of pocket than they already are!). These are just a few of the known certainties that will grace businesses in the coming 12 months.
It’s not all bleak though. Especially if you are quick to act. Think about it, prospective customers saving money all year? VAT set to increase in January? It seems to me that if people want to buy things – chances are it’s going to be this Christmas before those VAT & Student Fee increases.
So now is your chance – captialise on your online ecommerce! Hopefully throughout the year you have SEO’d your shop so that you are getting good traffic. PPC is also a good idea at this time of year as the chances are that the majority of your visitors are going to be in the buying state of mind. Now you’ve got traffic and a great website why not tweak it and grab those last ditch sales?
Here’s a few tips that I’ve grabbed from exploring the web this week that may help you out.
1. Theme it up
Get your website themed up! Make customers believe that your website takes Christmas as seriously as they do!
2. Delivery
Make sure you show your latest delivery date. Give your customer that piece of mind that if they order now – it WILL be delivered by Christmas.
3. Gift Service
Christmas is the perfect opportunity to capitalise on the gift market. Save your customer the hassle of wrapping and signing. Charge extra for gift wrapping and enable your multiple delivery addresses.
4. Special Offers
No-one will dare miss special offers at this time of year. It means the difference between spending £500 on a new TV for the family and spending £300 and saving money for the summer holiday next year. If your customers are in a hurry they will 90% of the time buy the item that is on offer.
5. Up-Sell and Cross-Sell
Come on – it’s really that obvious! You buy an electronic gift for your son or daughter..up-sell those batteries!
6. Save Your customer data
Why? Well because Christmas is not the only thing that matters in this stage of the seasons. January sales are just around the corner – if you have a nice big list of customers who have recently bought from you – make sure you let them know about your next batch of special offers in January!
7. Un-Clutter your website
This one is tricky because it can be very easy to simply spray everything in fake snow and stamp a reduced sticker on every item. Be selective. Know what sells and what doesn’t. Increase your stock for those you know will be big hits and re-order your product lists to show them higher on your categories. Make it EASY TO BUY, remember most visitors to your website at this time of year will be in a rush. If they feel that they can pop over to Amazon or play.com fill out and order and pay quicker than completing your checkout process they will do that. Complicated sites = lost sales.
8. Keep an Eye on Things
This one is a little strange but basically don’t just sit next to your emails waiting for the orders to roll in – get involved! Check the “online customers” option in your Magento admin area, this will show your where visitors are, what page they’re on, whether they are logged in or not. Another tip is to get yourself a chat tool for the website. Something like LiveZilla which is free to use could be perfect for your business. Just make sure you set aside enough time to handle the demand.
I’ll leave it at 8 today. I’ll be adding at least one more tip a week all the way up until Christmas – probably on a Friday so stay tuned and thanks for visiting our Magento Blog, here at E-commerce Web Design.
