Preparing your eCommerce for the Christmas period

Sales and offers

If you are celebrating the Christmas period and having sales or offers on your website you will need to let customers know about this. If you have social media putting a post up will engage customers to visit your site. On your website, one of the things that will catch customers will be a bright clear graphics promoting what sale or offer you have coming up or currently on. One of the main places for a seasonal graphic would be the homepage with a link that takes the customer directly to the seasonal page. On this page, a clear seasonal graphic should also be shown this will let the customer know they are on the right page.

Stock

Before you update anything on your ecommerce website you should always make sure you have enough stock to be able to keep up with the orders that may come in. Having more stock available will make it faster for you to process and send out when an order is placed and will make you feel more relaxed when orders are coming in as you will know you have enough items to cover everything coming in. If you have items that sell well during the time when offers/deals aren’t on this is a great time to stock up as you know these will sell fast.

Once you know you have enough stock to cover all the orders that are about to come in you should then update your website. If you already have a product on the website this may just be a case of updating the stock levels, if this is a brand new item you will have to upload a new product and enter all the details that will be needed to sell the item including the increased stock levels. Clear pictures and descriptive text is always good when selling a product if there is something you think a customer needs to know about the product that will help sell it then state it in the description.

Shipping

Shipping is always a high one when selling any product specially around the busy periods. On your website, you need to state how long postage is from the time the order is placed and how much postage is on top of the item price. As it is a busy period shipping can get backlogged if anything changes you will have to notify all customers who have ordered especially if the order will not be delivered by the stated date. A quick email to clients and an update on your social media page is all that is needed. Not only is this keeping customers in the loop it will save complaints and will be classed as good customer support.

Conclusion

Although the Christmas period is busy this is a prime time to get your company and website out into the public and can lead to increased sales all year round. Keeping engaged with customers will get you great reviews and recurring orders.