Do you own an eCommerce store and are looking for a guide to ace the BigCommerce Holiday strategy? This year’s pandemic has bought in a lot of ifs and buts in the picture. Especially when it comes to holiday shopping, a lot of people are still anticipating what would it look like! If we take a sneak peek back to the last few months, a lot of business ventures were forced to shut down temporarily while a lot of other retailers went through a bankruptcy too! But, it’s not all negative! Plenty of companies found ways to turn their strategy around and even thrive through lockdowns.
One of the business ventures we deeply look up to, Peloton went on to see a growth of 66% growth in the revenue from its sales. Additionally, medical and grocery take out options also went through a spike this year! Now, in this unprecedented year; a lot of consumers are not going for traditional Black Friday shopping in brick-and-mortar stores; but it’s the actual eCommerce sales that are expected to hike during the year. Here is an eCommerce holiday checklist which is a great place to start:
To that effect, we bring a holiday checklist to you to prep your BigCommerce store for the 2020 holiday season:
Contents
BigCommerce Holiday: The checklist to keep
Businesses can expect quite a hike during this holiday season to make quite a heavy revenue of their entire revenue. Your work through the checklist to ensure that you don’t miss anything:
Ensure that your consumers get the best user experience.
The most basic rule for any business to thrive is by offering the best user experience. It becomes even more imperative when it comes to eCommerce. The best way to start is with website design. To keep it minimal in low time, optimizing the speed and testing your infrastructure.
Your third party integrations need to be in place and cart abandonment notifications become more important than ever. Your merchandising strategy needs to get a boost up with proper lead generation campaigns. Try bringing in a special holiday strategy with your holiday products highlighted. Acing your game during this time is extremely crucial!
Special tip: Try tuning in your site search for each of your consumers. Make sure the search results of your website help in returning the accurate products and your consumer has a seamless experience even in these times with major traffic!
Increase your customer support and service for holiday traffic.
Following our previous tip, having efficient customer support and service is what is going to make you stand apart. Nobody likes breaking their head on figuring out how a product can reach them and surely nobody likes to spend hours trying to sort out their refund. In order to ensure accurate support, start by providing eCommerce support 24/7. This is literally the mantra that makes or breaks it for most businesses.
If you are looking at a chatbot, then respond to the inquiries frequently and make it quite fast! Also, your after-sales service should be bang on. Ensure that your feedback and contact forms are easy to place and you do not suffer a bounce rate during the process.
Special tip: During the holiday season with heavy traffic, a robust support team is what is going to help you get through the entire process. 24-48 hours is the window we recommend you to fulfill all your issues in and try getting an AI-powered chatbot in case you do have products that see quite a hike during the holiday season.
Simply make your process of shipping and fulfillment automated.
Nothing is going to help you like getting automation in place for both shipping and fulfillment. Try expanding your sales channels. Your options entail social commerce, cross border, online marketplaces as well as cross border selling.
Take the leap. Go for cross border selling and try shipping to your international consumers. We also recommend having your payment gateway integrated well in advance and with a market study sorted, ensure that you have your study set in place.
Special tip: BOPIS is a process you can adopt. It basically means buying on line, pick up in the store. As per a recent study, a 195% increase was seen in the year on year basis during the pandemic. It is becoming increasingly preferred as the delivery method for many consumers. So, especially as a retailer; you can definitely eliminate the shipping pain while delivering a secure and convenient shopping experience.
Make sure that the success of the holiday campaign is measured in metrics.
Metrics are pretty much the visual representation of your growth. Having your metrics in place is what’s going to help you understand your sales and efficiency in a much better manner. Have your goals set and ensure your KPIs are set too! This is what we typically recommend you to measure in order to ensure perfect metrics:
For eCommerce, your criteria entail the following:
- Conversion Rate
- New and traffic that returns to you
- Source of your traffic
- Mobile vs site visits
- Optimized speed of your site
- Bounce rate
For your marketing metrics, the following categories should make to your list:
- Banner or advertising Call to Actions
- Affiliate performance
- Average positioning
- Social media followers as well as likes
- Quality and quantity of the product reviews
Special tip: Keep your holiday strategy for 2020 as the base and tweak it as per your demands in 2021. Atleast you’d have an efficient core to work on and keep making it better as your consumer base improves.
Key takeaways
For 2020, consumers and businesses are looking ahead towards the holiday season to boost up the sales. Many shoppers are also buying gifts that they can send to their loved ones. Business owners on the other hand are looking forward to starting with an ideal kick start.
Strategizing your business for the holiday shopping season in any year is no small task. This particular year, more and more people will be ordering online; and whether they are picking up the items in the store or even having them sent over, giving them a seamless experience is crucial! So, all we want to say is take the holiday readiness with a step by step strategy and we are sure the results would surely work in your favor.
Looking for a holiday guide to your Shopify and Magento store? Well, we have you covered:
