Ever since the inception of the 21st century the world has become fully focused towards going digital. Hundreds of millionaires have found their fortunes through the internet, either by selling services and products or through internet fame. Today’s e-commerce is the most lucrative business models to get into, though a lot depends on how you execute your business. Setting up an e-business is not the most difficult of tasks, especially if you have someone managing and handling your business through years of experience and a heavy client portfolio such as Arturo Digital.
The holiday season is most lucrative time of the year for business to cash in on the most that they can. Everyone is walking around with a bunch of cash in their hands ready to spend it on anything that clicks with them.
In order for you to get the most out of this holiday season, we asked some of the best minds in the ecommerce industry to give us tips that have worked for them in the past. We had the founder and president of Dotmailer, Tink Taylor, to share with us his expert advice on what should businesses do when getting ready for the holiday season.
Question: What is your ecommerce tip for this Holiday Season for Merchants?
The responses from the experts were:
Email Marketing Automation:
Tink Taylor, Founder & President of Dotmailer Advised:
“It’s easy to focus on getting as many orders as possible in the run up to the holidays, but the downfall of many retailers is neglecting those customers once the season is over.Email marketing automation is the perfect channel for maximizing these relationships because it allows marketers to communicate throughout the customer lifecycle. Aim to collect every visitor’s email address – along with associated permissions – so you can turn those first-time buyers into happy, life-long customers. Remember that many people will be buying gifts during this time so it’s important to gather personal preferences, enabling you to target them with relevant content and product recommendations post the holidays. A simple way to do this is with a well-thought-out welcome email that’s triggered on sign-up, prompting customers to create an account and complete a profile.”
Load Test Ecommerce System:
Yoav Kutner, Former Co-Founder of Magento & Co-Founder, CEO Oro inc. Advised:
“Be prepared for your holiday season site traffic. Make sure to load test your site and ecommerce system to make sure it can handle the expected visitor volume. And of course cache as much as possible. Look for ecommerce systems like OroCommrce that are built to scale on an architectural level and can allow you to scale up for the holiday season and back down when it is over.”
Holiday-Proof Your Site With a CDN:
Jeries Eadeh, VP Of Channel Sales in Nexcess Advised:
“Most of the merchants have experienced a big traffic push on Black Friday, they may have a better understanding of the type of traffic the site can handle.Quickly and easily expand your geographic reach by setting up copies of your server assets worldwide. It won’t matter if your visitor is from London, San Francisco, or Sydney. Your CDN routes those visitors to a copy on a local data center that stores copies of your site’s key assets, accelerating the experience.”
E-commerce Trends:
Tomasz Karwatka, CEO of Divante Advised:
“According to our e-commerce Trends Report mobile was the #1 investment for e-commerce Managers in 2016 and in 2017. Nonetheless, mobile abandonment rates still exceed 80% and conversion rates are much lower than on desktop. Native apps have shown higher mobile conversion rates, but few merchants have the ability and budgets to force consumers to install another app. This is why PWA could be an interesting solution. The client is using your website but when their browser recognizes this is a PWA website, you can add this to their home-screen and they can use it as a standalone app. With PWA retailers can offer a faster, application-like experience, seamless checkout and payment processes, and higher engagement through push notifications. Early adopters of PWA have already seen significant reductions in page load-times, increases in site visits and double-digit increases in conversion rates. What is important now you can use an Open Source PWA solutions like vuestorefront.”
Take Advantage of Amazon Australia:
Jonathan Pollard, CEO, Co-founder of Codisto Advised:
“My advice would be to prepare your product data to take advantage of Amazon Australia opening in early 2018”
Holiday Season Plan:
Allan MacGregor, Director of Engineering at Demac Media Advised:
“Plan ahead, I don’t think there is anything more valuable to go into the holiday season with a plan; know how much traffic you are planning to drive to your site, test your promos, make sure your servers are the right size, etc.”
Be Prepared for Expected and Unexpected:
Andreas Mautz, Lead Developer Webvisum & Board Member of Firegento Advised:
“I would say “Know your business, be prepared and expect the unexpected”, which means the merchant should know their Business better than me, his ecommerce Agency. So he/she should know what to expect during the holiday season. And for this you should be prepared. From my Agency Point of View: Your systems should be possible to manage whatever you expect and include some reserves in case you underestimate the Hustle. And for the last Point: have reserves in nearly everything, check your contracts on SLAs and other supporting stuff (you will need them and you should Check in time if a 5-day email Response time fit your needs during the season). The last tip is to relax. Holidays, you know?”
Make Sure Your Site Handle 1.5 Times Traffic:
Brent W Peterson, Magento Evangelist at Wagento Commerce Advised:
“Know your hosting provider, have their number at hand so you can call them if you needKnow where your web person will be for the holidays, let them know you may call them when things are the busiest.Check with your hosting provider to make sure your site will handle 1.5 times the traffic it handled last year. If it does, then ask them about 2x the traffic. Ask them what you can do if the site goes down.Make you home page into a static page (Or any traffic driven landing page) html pages will load faster than a page that requires access to PHP”
Content is King:
Alex Podopryhora, Co-founder M2E Pro Advised:
“Content is king!!!!! Sell everywhere to capture different customer segments: amazon (pay attention to service & positive feedback; for that, you may increase your selling price), web store (personalized approach, focus on getting repeat business, offer discount vouchers, etc.), eBay (differentiate via content) – make your content great, don’t be mediocre. You may quote me: “Don’t be content (adjective) with your content (noun). Love your content! Then you will make more sales”. That means banners, product descriptions, item titles, keywords – don’t be lazy; Busy people buy experience and often the good price is not the main factor generating the sale. you may mention that M2E Pro services over 40’000 eBay accounts and 14’000 Amazon, – so we know what we are talking about!”
Shop Must Run Correctly:
Daniel,Web Developer and Larval Expert Advised:
“The most important step must be done before the holidays: The shop must run correctly and all changes (SEO, …) must have been made. During the holidays and just before Christmas there is always a high number of visitors. If something does not work, it is very annoying and losses are the result.”
That’s it for this holiday!
By incorporating all of the information that these highly distinguished e-commerce influencers your business is bound to be all set for a greatly prosperous holiday season.
