How to Boost Your E-commerce Store Sales In This Holiday Season

This Holiday season of the year 2015 is just right around the corner!

It is predicted that current year’s fourth quarter online sale will increase from 7 to 10 percent. Keeping this mind, most of the e-commerce companies have prepared themselves for this biggest growth year for the industry.
So, if you have owned an online business, it is the high time to get ready for breaking your revenue records with huge influx of holiday shoppers.
Sooner you prepare your website for this big opportunity, better you will have the chance at getting your shopper’s attention to spend their festival budget for your products.

To achieve a big online success on this holiday season, a lots more than ‘Hope’ needs to be done, right from updating and optimizing a website for an order fulfillment to optimize marketing.
In this write-up, we want you to succeed by kicking your coming holiday’s ROI into high gear.
So, first believe it, and then we will guide you how to put a plan in place to achieve it.

Get ready to position your e-commerce store to make the most for the quarter four  holidays pie!

Let’s go through following biggest things all set to Boost Your E-commerce Store Sales In This Holiday Season :

A High Quality Product Portfolio

Even within your tight budget, you can surely make a small but a high quality product portfolio by sparing a small corner or space of your storage space or warehouse.

Important to note here that on most product pages every photo size should not be less than 1600px wide to facilitate zooming function.

A high photo quality or resolution is likely to sell with more conversion rate i.e. 5% and moreover, 360-degree spin images takes its conversion to a next level by a whopping 27%.

Videos for The Products

Although high quality photos are great, still the videos for the products goes longer miles.

As per reports, if consumers who view a product video, then chances of a product to be added in cart increases to 144%, as compared to who don’t watch any video.

In contrary to your thinking, it is much more easier to arrange a simple lighting setup for product videos. You can go through Wistia’s tutorial to learn how to set up lighting on the fly.

During this holiday season, you should wisely plan to shoot simple videos for your best selling products aiming to the holiday rush.

Re-market Abandoned Cart

Major opportunities come in with all the abandoned shopping carts. Sometimes customers put a single or more items into a shopping cart and then decide not to complete the purchase, may be due to side-tracked or confusing checkout process, the scaring shipping cost or they just didn’t need that item.

As per a Sales Cycle report, in most online retail, it is average around 70% for the abandoned cart rate. So, there are a TON of missed opportunities! You may get 36% higher opening rate with re-marketing emails than with traditional emails. Moreover, of those clicked emails about 30% can be converted into a completed sale. Hence, you should plan to invest some of your bucks for the customers who are

statistically much closer to spending their money with you than spending all your marketing budget for getting new opportunities.

Review Your Products

It is always a big deal, with a social proof!

Mostly people (Approx 70%) before purchasing a product normally look for online customers reviews. These customers reviews helps to create a massive increase (approx 74%) in product conversions.

A plenty of ways are there to manage and handle reviews to your e-commerce site. You can consider some third party services like Bazaarvoice, Trust Pilot and Revoo.

There are plugins to handle reviews, if you’re a user of Magento, Shopify or BigCommerce.

Furthermore, to encourage your recent customers for reviews, you can offer them with a discount or an incentive scheme on any future order, to ensure that in this coming festive season, your customers will have some nice reviews to push them towards the “purchase” button.

Watch-out Progress Bar

In an e-commerce business, a well-designed progress bar also acts a major conversion increaser. It helps shoppers to view on which step they are in the process and how much steps they have to follow to complete the whole purchase.

According to Forbes improving the checkout process, you can increase your shopper’s conversions by 28.89% by showing a clear path towards completion.

So always make sure your shoppers know each and every step where they stand in the process and to persuade them to complete that process.

A Nice Mobile Shopping Experience

As per Shopify report of year 2014, all e-commerce mobile traffic accounts for more than 50% and one third of whole online purchase happened on mobile. A distance between a good and bad mobile shopping experience reside in that one half of traffic and one third of customers. Every year visitors experience with a bad mobile UX is decreasing repeatedly. So, you should choose the ways beyond having a simple responsive online site.

Try to plan the best mobile checkout experience for your shoppers by taking help with the Responsive Mobile Websites Development.

Beside this a clear mobile payment process should also be considered to make your e-store visitor’s experience more mobile-customer-friendly .

Build Your Server to Handle Sudden Traffic

You will be glad to see your selling product popularity in a prominent holiday must-have list or on Pinterest. But, if you have not scaled your server to automatically handle traffic spikes, then there may be chances that you suffer from issues with connectivity and load time.

Therefore, to tackle this sudden holiday shoppers influxes it is recommend to use a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a cloud-based hosting solution to handle sudden web-traffic fluctuations.

Seize the Leads!

The primary step in a successful online sale process is turning a visitor to an identifiable lead. Even if your visitors are not showing interest to purchase immediately, make it sure that visitors are getting entered into email marketing process or your CRM. Also, never forget to seize information of interested visitors on their first visit, so that you can later follow up with them.

You can try a pop-up email opt-in message especially to seize those visitors who might want more information from you before finalising a product purchase.

After getting visitors email details, you can build and nurture relationship with them by sending enticing and awesome messages to convert them as a lifetime customer.

You can see a 97% growth by instituting this exit overlay email opt-in pop-up.

Easy and Hassle-free Return Policy

A return policy can break or make a sale, for many online buyers.

Mostly companies, oftentimes make promise of free returns to improve their sales rate.

One study concludes that by offering a free return to customers, sales rate may improve by up to 357%!

According to Internet Retailer reports, top 500 online retailers have an average return rate of 3.47% (Overall Av. Return Rate 4.96%)

So, for an online shopper, it is surely worth trying out free returns to see positive sales results.

Now, make the most of the huge Festive Traffic!

According to National Retail Federation year 2014 report, Jewelry stores had reported a sales boost of 28% during the previous year holiday season. Also, according to the U.S. Census Bureau report, your high shoppers percentage depends on the products type that your e-commerce store offer for selling.

A holiday traffic is a golden opportunity to attract an entirely new crowd!

You can get it right on the coming shoppers traffic as their first awesome experience, and there is no doubt many of these shoppers can convert into potential customers. Furthermore, in order to gain a long term permanent shopper’s base, you should keep on exceeding shopper’s expectations throughout the sales process.

A high-traffic in a holiday season supposed to be the most competitive for merchants. So, to survive with this competition, your web-store needs to be well equipped to provide an optimized experience to the shoppers.

If you are planning to start your online e-commerce business, then you can take help from  How to Create an ebay Store to Kick Start Your Online Business?

This holiday season promises big for online sales.

So get ready to dedicate the time and necessary resources to outperform your competitors by delighting your customers.

Make sure you count higher revenues by following the above mentioned tips in the holiday ends.

If you require help to succeed in this holiday season and for the years to come, then you may contact us at TBI.

Our e-Commerce specialists at TBI would always be ready to guide you, how to implement a flexible e-commerce development solution that streamlines your entire operation and grows your business.

Furthermore, beside above steps, if you have some other exceptional tips for to Boost an E-commerce Store Sales,  then feel free to share it with us in comment section.