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If year over year spending trends are any indicators, then we can safely conclude that holidays are reserved for online shopping sprees. Similarly heavy discount sales also push sales of e-commerce stores through the roof. This calls for some pretty serious thinking in terms of designing strategies so that your online store is ready to cope up with traffic spikes during vacations.
Begin with basics
The fundamental task for making sure that your business website is ready to handle the onslaught of vacation traffic is to confirm with your web hosting service provider. This applies more for websites that are hosted on shared accounts. Your web host can certainly give you an idea about the ability of your website to deal with sudden traffic spikes. There are chances that performance of your website may be compromised due to excessive resource consumption of neighboring sites. Remember that downtime and slow page loading can seriously arm your revenues by turning down shoppers.
Mobile ready site
It is now confirmed beyond doubt that people prefer mobile phones for browsing than their desktops. This also implies that your website will be viewed on your customers’ mobile phones. Hence you must ensure that your website is compatible with mobiles. If the site is not mobile ready, then you will be losing out on a major chunk of your potential customers who are trendy and are going to browse on the move.
Optimize size of graphics
Images and graphics can really enhance any website’s appeal. However, these beautiful images need to be resized to offer a nice effect on smaller screens of mobiles. Please note that image size must not be large enough to cover or spill out of the screen. There are several tools out there to help you resize graphics such as compressor.io or jpegmini.com.
Standard fonts please
You may think that unique fonts highlight your style and to some extent it is true. However, you need to think from your visitor’s shoes and make the fonts as easy as possible to read on the fly. There is nothing like standard fonts when it comes to an enhanced browsing experience. If you need to use custom fonts or no-standard fonts, then put a limit to these and use sparingly. You may also use cookies to indentify whether custom fonts are available in the cache.
Security pays
Always make sure that you are providing a reliable and secure shopping experience to your visitors. Yes, you owe it to them for visiting your site and for making a buying decision. Security can be offered by offering SSL encryption that can also provide them confidence of green colored ‘https’ letters and a symbol of a padlock in your websites URL. Another way to improve security quotient of your site is by adding security badges in the lower right hand corner.
Socialize for a ‘cause’
There are multiple advantages of social sites in addition to socialization. You can announce your plans for upcoming sales promotion events by posting it on all social sites and also on website’s home page. The most useful social media is Facebook in terms of driving sales. The idea of the whole exercise of accessing social media is to drive potential customers to your online store.
Loud and clear return policy
You need to show utmost honesty regarding your return policy by exhibiting the same prominently on the site. Nobody, including you likes to buy something only to discover that it doesn’t fit the bill. There should be no confusion regarding this advice.
Smart use of keywords
Keywords help drive potential clients right to your website. These need to be identified by using some of the most sought after research tools including Google AdWords Keyword Planner and so forth. These keywords help you optimize your website and also to create compelling blog posts.
Keywords can be used in primary website content, your product descriptions and headings for better search engine rankings. Use of keywords in Alt Text is also recommended if there are images in your website.
Keywords can also be searched by understanding the most relevant keywords of the yester year. You can use keywords such as ‘gift for friend’ or ‘best gifts’ to write blogs and articles in addition to using primary keywords that are identified by you through keyword research. This will help you get the best holiday keywords for your site.
Enhance client fulfillment
It is natural that customer expectations are on the rise and these will continue to move upward forever. This underlines importance of providing easy return policies, customer friendly order management, same day delivery, store pickup, payment terms, COD, and what not. These service offerings or fulfillment options should be clearly informed in the FAQ format so that they are confident about shopping on your site.
By following these vital suggestions, you can certainly hope to make the most of upcoming holiday season. You also need to confirm that your web hosting service is geared up to support your needs.
