For many regions around the country, the summer season is just getting started. People are digging lawn chairs out of the garage and going through their bottom dresser drawers to retrieve that favorite pair of shorts. While nobody wants to think about the upcoming holiday season as the smell of freshly cut grass and burning charcoal fills the air, now is the perfect time for ecommerce sellers to start preparing their sites for success.
For many online retailers, the holiday season is a critical time of the year as it relates to accomplishing their annual sales goals. As you enjoy the hazy, lazy days of summer with your favorite book and beverage, here are some great tips on making the most out of the upcoming 2019 holiday season for your ecommerce site.
SEO-SEO-SEO
The competition in ecommerce is fierce and growing tougher every year, so it is very important that your website stands out from the crowd for online buyers. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a critical part of your ecommerce strategy, as it directly involves shoppers’ ability to find your site in search results.
The higher your website ranks in the major search engines, such as Google, the better chance that visitors will choose it to do their shopping. SEO can be maximized organically by embedding keywords or phrases that best describe your products into the site’s content, so that these terms can picked up by the crawlers that Google uses to rank search results. SEO can also be aided by “paid search”, where online sellers pay Google to have their websites be displayed more prominently. Getting a good head start on an SEO strategy can be a great way to boost your visibility during the holiday season.
Inventory Confirmation
There’s an old saying in retail that if you don’t have it, you can’t sell it. This is especially true for ecommerce sellers. Now is the perfect time to make arrangements and get confirmation from your suppliers that you will have the inventory you need in time for the upcoming holiday season.
There is nothing worse for an online store than to feature a popular product, but then be unable to make the sale. Online shoppers can be quite unforgiving and will quickly abandon your website for another that is able to deliver the goods. Take the time now to ensure that you will have all the product you need when online shoppers with money to spend come knocking on your door.
Try To Break Your Site
When you boil it down, an ecommerce website is only as effective as it is usable. Before happy shoppers go clicking around this holiday season, be sure that your site’s functionality is operating at top performance. Carefully go through each section and try out everything that a shopper would use to complete a transaction.
This includes top navigation, onsite search, shopping cart, check out, email sign up and more. Be creative and try to “break” the site by finding flaws or friction points in the functionality. If everything works as it should, you will have the peace of mind to know that you are providing a great experience for shoppers and also giving them the tools they need to convert. Should something go awry during your testing, you have plenty of time to fix whatever is not working.
Load Testing
Having too much business is often considered to be a “quality problem” in retail, but it can spell disaster for an ecommerce site during the holiday season. Load testing is a very important tool that provides insight into how much traffic a website can handle under both normal and peak activity conditions.
By artificially putting user “demand” or a “load” on a server for evaluation purposes, ecommerce sellers create a safe and consequence free environment in which to test their site for durability. It is very important that a website’s server accommodate even the most highly anticipated amount of traffic.
Server capacity can be increased if it is determined that a site does not perform well under stress. Giving yourself plenty of time to determine how much activity your server can handle will pay off big time, as there is nothing like a crashed website to eliminate the chances for a prosperous holiday season.
Conclusion
Summer is a great time for fun, relaxation and making memories. It is also a wonderful opportunity to prepare your ecommerce business for the upcoming holiday season. By boosting your SEO, confirming inventory levels, evaluating site functionality and load testing, you are ensuring that your ecommerce website will make the most out of the busiest selling time of the year.
Americaneagle.com specializes in helping ecommerce websites excel not only during the holiday season, but also all year long. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you maximize your ecommerce success!
Contact Us Today!