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It's a beautiful, sunny day outside – and it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Gingerbread cookies are appearing on supermarket shelves and sellers are starting to prepare for Christmas. For good reason: the holiday shopping season is the most profitable time to be in e-commerce. This article gives you several practical tips that will help you gear up for the peak selling season of 2018.
1. Help your customers buy gifts
Potential customers are likely to browse through entire product categories while looking for hot deals and meaningful gifts. If an item seems promising, then it's often saved as a favourite (assuming such a service is offered) or it's placed directly in the customer's shopping cart – where it's typically forgotten. By reminding customers of items that they saved as favourites or placed in their shopping cart, you simultaneously remind customers of your product portfolio. Reminder e-mails are also a good way to highlight additional cross-selling items and thus help customers find the perfect gift for their loved ones.
2. Improve your visibility on marketplaces
Online marketplaces like Amazon are the place to be during the holiday shopping season. They do lots of business at this time of year since customers can find multiple gifts with very little effort. Keep this in mind and focus on Amazon SEO so that your products rank at the top of search results. The more you plan ahead of time, the more successful you will be on marketplaces.
When it comes to visibility on eBay, plentymarkets has another trick up its sleeve. The new eBay SEO plugin lets you tweak your listings, so that your customers will find them in a heartbeat. This is a nifty way to boost your pre-Christmas sales in no time!
3. Give your shop a speed boost
The popular shopping events Black Friday and Cyber Monday have spread from the USA to Europe over the past years and they have been gaining popularity ever since. These are days when it’s particularly important for your shop to provide top-notch usability, so that impatient customers do not decide to look for alternatives elsewhere. Sellers often underestimate the importance of their store’s loading speed. But with the ShopBooster, you can let your Ceres store shine! Thanks to content caching, loading times can sink to under 100ms time to first byte, which lets your customers shop at top-speed! Incidentally, this also boosts your SEO ratings, since search engines reward quick loading times.
4. Offer an exchange service
Christmas is a time for exchanging gifts - in every sense of the word. When buying gifts in your store, customers are likely to place emphasis on convenient return options. Make sure to offer a reliable and above all free exchange and return service, so that you can meet your customers' expectations.
5. Generate attention
It’s never too late to jump on the bargain wagon - even shortly before the shopping events Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Reach your target group on short notice with directed e-mail marketing and social media posts. Make use of tempting offers to direct your customers to your shop or your marketplace portfolio, where you can impress them with low prices and attractive products.
Whether you want to sell items on multiple channels or promote your store, our post about social media management teaches you how to promote special offers on your social media channels.
We wish you a happy holiday shopping season!