As the holiday season is drawing near, more and more people are starting to look for Christmas presents.

Usually, the most massive shopping weekend of the year starts when everyone will be ready to spend money on gifts, friends, loved ones, or themselves.

For example, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’d see a tremendous increase in website visitors, and so is their eagerness to buy.

This upward surge of sales won’t likely disappear after Christmas. However, this sudden spike in traffic may also cause stress to site owners and digital marketers.

To save yourself from the stress and still take advantage of the boost of prospective customers, here are points that you ought to consider to prepare your online store and make it a profitable holiday season:

Revamp your website

We don’t suggest redoing your website design completely. You can customize your site for the Holiday Season by adding a couple of changes.

For instance, placing a countdown timer in your site’s header, for instance, is an excellent strategy to enhance the sense of urgency.

Switching up your banners into headers that promote Christmas or Black Friday sales is also an excellent practice and relatively easy to implement.

You can even dress up your site for the holiday theme if you have the budget.

Switching up elements in your site that reflect, ‘It’s the Holidays!’ will increase your visitors’ willingness to shop on your site and maintain the holiday spirit.

Just don’t be too taken away with holiday themes, though. Ideally, you still want your customers to recognize your brand and have a user-friendly shopping experience from your store.

Spruce up your landing pages

Your holiday landing pages should promote your sales and showcase your customers’ deals and savings without needing your customers to scroll through and search your site.

You might also want to consider adding a sense of urgency, like “Deals Ends at Midnight,” or “One Day Sale Only.”

You may also consider placing a countdown graphic that shows the days or hours left for the sale to end.

Your landing pages allow customers to browse and then click on the referral link on your site, offering a clear path to conversions. Meaning, placing CTAs like “Buy Now,” or “Check Out” buttons can convert your customers in just a few clicks.

As product reviews have become increasingly important in the buyer’s decision-making process, consider positive reviews as an integral part of the landing page’s content.

Test your website performance

Your site’s performance should be one of your main priorities. Ideally, your e-commerce store should be ready for scalability and stability to handle your customers’ increased demands.

By improving your site’s speed in milliseconds, you can avoid site bounces and shopping cart abandonment.

You can start by having your team check the page-load of every element in your site- from how long it takes for the page to render to how quick the actual check-out process is.

Adopt a mobile-first mindset

Many people are now going mobile, your site must work perfectly well on mobile devices. Just ensure that users won’t have any problems with it when they’re shopping.

That’s why testing your mobile site is obligatory. Just ensure that you don’t make any massive changes. Did a user find a perfect gift for their loved ones last October, and they came back in December to purchase it?

Then, you should quickly locate the item and not waste their time looking for it.

Create gift guides

It’s quite tempting to throw in a list on your site with holiday ideas. But taking your time to come up with product descriptions and make it look great will help take it up by a notch.

You can place links, images, and short descriptions of the items in your gift guides. Or if someone has recommended your item or a service, then it helps that you include a reason for it.

Let’s say you want to include salt and pepper in your gift guide. At first, many people might be quite skeptical about it. But what if you tell them that it’s one of the unique salt and pepper shakers they could probably have?That it doesn’t dispense the salt too fast, or too slow, and that the pepper tastes fresh, then they could be adding it to their cart any moment now.

Remember that your holiday gift guide’s content is as vital as the content and ideas you’ll be including.

Furthermore, a holiday gift guide that’s visually appealing, easy to read, and use will allow you to get more views and shares with just one picture.

Optimize your check-out process

Cart abandonment is often higher during check-out. Customers are backing out at the last minute because of unexpected costs, technical glitches, too many form fields, or even a lack of trust in the payment portal.

To help reduce the check-out process’s complexity, you should aim to provide your customers with a relatively easy, straightforward check-out process.

Here are some helpful tips:

• Always ensure that you’re showing the shopping cart as well as the total.
• Be transparent with the shipping costs, especially with the taxes and additional fees.
• Provide a quick guest check-out.
• Keep check-outs on a single page. The lesser the clicks, the better.
• Display your return policies, mostly if your sale items are excluded from it.
• Make sure that you highlight your security badges, as well as payment compliances.

You might also consider adding digital wallets to your payment process, adding methods like Android Pay, GoogleWallet, Apple Pay, PayPal, Visa Checkout, and the likes.

Adjust your return and exchange policy

Your holiday return and exchange policy should be adjusted accordingly to your company or brand’s rules and guidelines.

More so, most customers expect that their gifts can be exchanged or returned, which is the main reason why many retailers are now providing free and convenient return options.

To compete, small and mid-sized stores should also consider doing the same. During the holiday season, your return and exchange policy should be lax.

It’s also quite wise if you provide free returns and exchange policy to your customers. While doing so might cause your extra, this will likely significantly boost your sales.

While you think that your holiday return policy is quite simple to understand, that notion is entirely subjective. Ensure that you test it out, and see that there will be no complications or misunderstandings.

Build up your customer service

Because it’s the holidays, people are more likely going to reach out to you often. They may want to know whether a specific product will arrive on time or want to know more about a particular product.

That’s precisely why you should make customer service your highlight and make sure that you’re always available for any customer inquiries.

You may also want to integrate live chat as well. According to the survey from Software Advice, more and more people, especially millennials, prefer to use live chat. That’s why you must consider integrating live chat on your site.

Automate wherever needed

For most e-commerce stores, the most demanding time of the year is the holiday season. Even small duties like printing shopping labels, sending in emails, or sending trivial stuff can quickly add up.

That’s why retailers need to use automation tools whenever they can to help lighten up the load.

By using MailChimp to streamline your email communications, including abandoned cart emails, and using AI chatbots assists you in cutting down customer service queries, send users with promotional messages, and boost sales this holiday season.

Get Organized

Before you put up all your items for sale, make sure that all your products are well-stocked and organized in a seamless inventory system.

Being an e-commerce company or brand, you must prepare for any spikes in holiday sales. You don’t want customer demand to catch you out.

Make sure that you have a streamlined inventory system that will reflect what you have available online.

Dig Your Competitors

The holidays are a great time to check what your competitors are currently doing.

You may look up all the marketing tactics that they did that lead up to every holiday. Also how they communicated with customers during, and after the holiday season.

The goal here is not to replicate your competitors. However, you can use their approaches as an inspiration for ideas to help you enhance and build on your holiday promotions.

Over to You

Although you can never have everything perfect and under wraps for the holiday season, you can make your ecommerce store ready for the holiday season with enough planning.

Planning ahead of time helps you eliminate last-minute scrambles, leading to poorly defined strategies or poor customer experiences. You can throw in a survey, through a handy survey maker tool to know what your audience wants from the get go.

So, make this holiday season the best yet for your e-commerce store by optimizing your site just in time for the seasonal rush. Good luck!

This article is contributed by Andi Croft – a freelance writer whose main interests are topics related to blogging, business, technology, and travel.