The holiday season is here. All you have to do is go to your local store and you’ll see all of the Christmas candy, yard decorations, and useless crap, shoved in right next to the Haloween stuff (also more than a month away).
Here are a few tips to keep you and your e-commerce website ahead of the curve this holiday season.
Make your comapny logo holiday friendly
Your logo represents your company. Show some holiday spirit and add some holly or a little festive decoration to it. Let your website visitors know that you know it is the holiday season and you are ready for them to shop in your online store.
Consider Free shipping (if you can afford it)
When I am shopping online I find myself looking for the best deal possible. Often times I’ll find the same item on many different websites. Many times it comes down to who has free shipping. If you can afford it, offering free shipping to your e-commerce customers can mean the difference between making the sale or not.
Product Inventory
This is a big one. Make sure that you, or your suppliers, have enough inventory to fufill the online orders you anticipate recieving. There is nothing worse than ordering something online, especially for Christmas, and not getting it on time because the website you ordered it from does not know how to control their inventory. This is very important. You pretty much get only one chance to make a customer happy online. If they have enough faith in you and your website to place an order, be sure you have the inventory to fill it.
Solid E-Commerce Platform
This should go without saying, but I’m going to anyway. If you are going to sell anything online, you have to do it right. Having a solid platform for your online store is crucial. There are many out of the box solutions that may fit your needs or can be easily customized. Often times a custom e-commerce web design is neccesary to bring the shopping experieince you want to your customers. Either way there are several things to consider, a few of them are inventory management, credit card and payment processing, and order fulfillment.
Product Images
This may be the most important one of them all. The images that you use to represent your products must be high quality images. If not you are wasting your time. The images should also allow your website visitor to visualize themselves using your product. A high-quality product image can increase sales 10 fold.
