It is no secret: People buy more during the holiday season at the end of the year (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.) It is also time for Magento 2 store owners to get the biggest sales ever. However, you had better prepare carefully or the holiday season might become a disastrous experience: overcrowded traffic; site down; stock out; or late delivery.
So, in this 2019 holiday seasons, you must:
- Maintain and improve your website performance
- Get your inventory ready for bulk orders
- Show off your catalogs with attractive discounts/promotions
- Offer dedicate services and high-quality products, not just the discounted price
- Make the delivery smooth and on time
Follows are tips to complete those tasks and get your revenue x5 bigger!
Tactics for a Profitable Holiday Season [Infographic]
Table of Contents
5 Common Mistakes That Hurt Your Sales Badly
Site crashing due to high traffics
Good news, many people take interest in your website, ready to buy.
Bad news, your Magento 2 server is not quality enough to handle such an overloading request. Consequently, the website is slow-to-load and unresponsive. Since customers are hurry to buy, they will leave for your competitors!
Fortunately, there is still some time left before the upcoming traffic-spike months. Here we share the best practices to enhance your website’s performance.
Show dedicated content instead of error message
Even when you follow all recommended practices, your site might still go down for some reason. So, get prepared!
Don’t show an annoying error page, customers will go away. It is better to display a dedicated apology, at least saying “Sorry for the delay. We will be back soon, very soon.” Or, redirect the down page to other offers, something interesting enough to keep the customers staying to wait. Even show an animated cat – many people love it!
Anyway, anything is better than showing a human-less error.
Have your website audited and maintained
Check your website’s healthy first whenever you want to make bulk changes, for example, during the big sales events. What to check:
- Overall performance: customer experience; website responsiveness; analysis of main pages; browser compatibility.
- Frontend analysis: HTML, CSS, JavaScript reviews; theme checkup; Performance review.
- Backend analysis: Magento core and database integrity; security & patches; 3-party integration and compatibility.
Cache everything you can
Magento collects configuration from all modules used in your website, merges it and saves the merged configuration to the cache. In case you make lots of changes at a time, then the cache takes time and results in the website’s failures to respond to the customer’s demand as wished.
To make all functionalities smooth and flawless, you should clean or flush cache in real-time.
Balance the load
For those who might not know, load balancing is a must-do action to distribute network traffic across multiple servers, normally based on some segments. Hence, no single server bears overloaded demand, especially during the holiday season. Then how?
You should diversify customers based on their locations (a CDN will help); prepare for more sessions than you expected, and test your serves under pressure.
Stock-outs
During the holiday season, products are sold like hotcakes. Then, your products become out-of-stock quickly without inventory planning.
Not only do you lose potential sales, but your customers also feel frustrated. Thus, it is time (actually, a little bit now) to make an inventory audit and plan accordingly.
To-do list:
- Create a calendar of key dates: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.
- Predict customers’ demands based on marketing analysis; last-year data; current trends.
- Make a shortlist of products and quantities to be ordered for big sales events.
- Contact the suppliers to get the best price. Also, plan the cash flow carefully.
- Decide the final list, lead time, and place the orders accordingly.
Hidden website changes
Obviously, you need to decorate your websites, make changes in price and product descriptions during the time of big sales events. But why in the world you make it hard to firgure out?
A homepage banner with Halloween or Xmas vibes is the most effective way to catch visitors’ eyes at their very first step into your Magento 2 website – Say cheers to the holiday and point them to gifts of discounted products or services.
Also, decorate your product pages; social channels; or even your logo.
More importantly, try to avoid hidden information. Almost all customers are in a rush for shopping on those days. Hence, you had better make all promotions, prices, shipping & payments clear. This helps fasten the purchasing decision.
Unhelpful customer support
Price is, for sure, the most attractive deal when it comes to the holiday season. However, to be successful in 2019, price discounts are far from enough! You must still provide responsive support, high-quality products, and more.
As we said, holiday shoppers often want a quick purchase so that they can go for other choices. Hence, besides browsing your website, they often contact for help. Make sure your support team is responsive and helpful, even at rush hours.
Best practices for customer support during the big sales events:
- Training your team properly.
- Staying customer-obsessed with listening ears and caring minds.
- Offering omnichannel or self-service support.
- Being underpromise and overdeliver all the time.
No Date-certain Delivery
On-time delivery is always important in ecommerce transactions. During the holiday season, it becomes even more critical. Customers often buy gifts for family, relatives, and friends so they want to receive them as quickly as possible.
If you fail to offer them to do so, for sure, you lose sales.
You ought to make the communication upon delivery clear and easy at the first step of the checkout.
Specifically, it would be best to:
- Allow customers to pick up their preferred delivery date and time.
- Leave some space for them to add notes/additional information.
- Set up delivery date based on your availability (cutoff time, processing time, blackout days, etc.)
- Provide various shipping and payment options under customers’ fingertips.
- Clarify all taxes, fees, and additional costs – if any right at the checkout.
- Deliver the products on time as agreed.
Last Thought
BSS Commerce is one of the leading Multi-platform eCommerce solutions and web development services providers in the world. With experienced and certified developers, we commit to bringing high-quality products and services to optimize your business effectively. Talk to our expert now!
We know all you need for this 2019 holiday season, hence we have developed many extensions to meet your demands.
