The last months of the year are the hottest time in e-commerce. Black Friday has not yet arrived, but it is already time to prepare for the next sales peak – the New Year holidays. How to prepare an online store for this period to collect the cream of online sales?
Study customer behavior
Knowing and understanding your target audience is one of the main rules of business. How many gifts are your customers planning to buy? What are they guided by when choosing presents? How much money are you willing to spend?
If you do not yet know the exact answers to these questions, carefully study the statistics prepared by the Mastercard service. The company investigated the behavior of Ukrainians during the New Year holidays and made the following conclusions:
63% of respondents treat the choice of gifts more seriously compared to the period before the pandemic. During the quarantine, we felt the value of family holidays even more;
56% of Ukrainians will reduce spending on gifts. After all, the quarantine affected the budget of most families;
at the same time, 66% of respondents will spend more effort and time looking for gifts than before.
And what products will people look for in online stores? In the TOP are products for beauty and health, clothes for couples, gifts-impressions, sets for handmade, jewelry. Gadgets, sweets and household goods do not lose their positions.
Tip: the crisis forces customers to approach the choice of gifts carefully. Therefore, it is worth taking seriously the formation of a product line and promotional offers. We will tell you more about this below.
Take care of the assortment
This is probably the main point when preparing for the holiday sales peak. It is important to strike a balance here. If there are not enough goods in the warehouse, you will not be able to earn the maximum. Too much – there is a risk that the product will lie until the next New Year. how to be Adhere to the golden mean:
- stock up on universal, running goods. If the budget allows, it is better to produce or order more than to be left with an empty warehouse on December 25;
- release a New Year series of products. New Year’s pajamas, cozy candles, cups in knitted coasters – all this goes for “hooray”, but only in the current period. If you already had experience selling thematic goods, take it into account when forming the assortment;
- group gift products on a separate page of the site. A separate category with gifts will make life easier for the buyer. What products to add to it? Use the information from the first point of the article;
- take care of the price range of the gift items. It is good if you can offer the client options for any wallet;
- offer gift certificates of various denominations. This is a universal gift that will also attract new customers.
Tip: in order to make money in the pre-New Year period, it is not necessary to add Christmas trees and garlands to the assortment of the site. In almost any online store, you will find a dozen products that are suitable for the role of a gift. During the holidays, display them on the main page of the site or make a separate selection.
Offer ready-made solutions
Let’s be honest: choosing gifts is a pleasant thing, but at the same time difficult. Your client doubts whether a loved one will like the gift. Most likely, he orders several products, and if he cannot find them from one seller, he mentally calculates how much money will be spent on delivery. And the gifts also need to be wrapped!
Therefore, we offer to take care of the client and offer ready-made solutions:
- create gift sets. This option works great for small and inexpensive gifts, when one thing is not enough, and a set is what you need. For the seller, there is a chance to sell obsolete goods by combining them with popular ones;
- prepare holiday packaging. Thematic tags, tape, boxes will be inexpensive. Instead, the buyer will be able to order a gift immediately to the address of a loved one.
Tip: make gift sets themed to interest buyers. For example, an online grocery store can create a kit for making mulled wine or hot chocolate. In short, the set should have a clear usage scenario.
Prepare the site for traffic
Imagine that in the midst of New Year’s shopping in a shopping center, the electricity goes out. People can’t find the product, and if by some miracle they find it, they can’t pay for it. Roughly the same chaos can happen if the site “goes down” at the most crucial moment.
Here is what the owner of the online store needs to record:
- server Make sure that in the event of an increase in traffic, the site will withstand the load;
- convenience. Although 66% of people are ready to spend a lot of time choosing gifts, this does not mean that they will be happy to search for the right products in a complex structure of pages;
- purchase process It should be as simple and fast as possible. Maybe during the holidays it is worth at least temporarily simplifying the order process?
Tip: rate the site in terms of reliability and convenience for the buyer. For example, ask friends to go through the customer journey on your site and collect feedback. At what stage did they want to drop everything and go to a competitor?
Think through the logistics
Even if the site can withstand the load, the weak link in the business can be people. During peak sales periods, storekeepers and couriers are under a tremendous load. Here’s what it threatens:
- errors in ordering. Due to the huge amount of work, the storekeeper can make a mistake and send the client not what he wanted to receive;
- shortage of packaging materials. At the most crucial moment, it turns out that the warehouse has run out of boxes, film and filler;
- delivery delays. At least a quarter of Ukrainians order gifts at the last moment. And of course they expect the order to arrive no later than the next day.
Tip: delegate operational processes to a fulfillment operator and don’t worry about the human factor.
