That Most Wonderful Time of the Year is Almost Here

As the days of November are upon us, ecommerce vendors must be kicking around thoughts of how to make this holiday season their most successful yet. Every year the competition increases; also, every year there are new potential buyers ready to shun full parking lots and complete holiday shopping from the comfort of their desktops.
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To ready for what could be a record-breaking year for your business, make sure you have prioritized and planned. That sounds cliché, but get this: While shoppers a decade ago were content to await the “Black Friday” post-Thanksgiving kickoff date to dive in to holiday buying, by 2016 more than 40 percent of all online shoppers began their purchasing before Halloween. This year, that’s expected to increase.

At some point, your success as an online vendor will rest on your willingness to navigate to a mobile platform. If you want to attract the customers more likely to pad your pockets, you’ll need to hit them where they live – and increasingly, that is on their smartphones and tablets. Last year more than 20 percent of holiday shoppers made gift purchases from mobile devices.  Customizing your ads and promotional communications to read neatly on devices as well as full-screen computers may make a huge difference in your revenues.

Other hot tips to cashing in on holiday buying madness include:

• Researching your buying base. Identify the types of shoppers who have purchased from or visited your site in the past. Lean on them for repeat business.
• Shaping up inventory. Based on past sales patterns and current market trends, decide on which products to stock and how aggressively to market each one of them.
• Perfecting the art of sequencing. Plan an ordered strategy of sending the right message at the right time of the browsing process, from searching to filling a shopping cart. Acting as an unobtrusive yet friendly guide will ease their decision-making tasks.
• Devising a calendar. Set specific dates for accomplishing every aspect of your holiday marketing and fulfillment functions, including targeted emails, updated site pages, planned sales events, and back-end shipping and inventory details. (For future planning, get a jump on holiday shopping events with a handy calendar from Ecommerce Training Academy. They will have a 2018 version loaded at the end of this year.)
• Making it urgent. Helping customers along in the buying process often involves a gentle push with an imperative or excitement-laced message reminding them to tackle their shopping early.
  
  

Ecommerce giant Shopify.com has some creative ideas on how to dress up your website with festive holiday themes, making customers feel the love of pulling out plastic and fulfilling wishes.

Find even more useful tips from Bitly.com on how to convert the end-of-year shopping celebration into more cash for your biz.
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And finally, remember that holiday shopping opens up an invaluable opportunity you’ve probably never thought of: free advertising. If your goods are being distributed all over the country, chances are good it will translate to business in the post-holiday lull. To make this more of a reality, include a signature branding element with each shipment. With any luck it will reach the lucky recipient and entice a new customer.