Tips for Selling Online at Christmas
Christmas is the season of giving, which means it’s the season of shopping. Your eCommerce store needs to be prepared. This means your site needs to be optimised to handle the extra web traffic without crashing. Once that’s done, follow these tips to boost your sales volumes.
- Get your Christmas stocks early
Lots of people complain about early Christmas decorators. Some homes and businesses start decking their halls in November, while others prefer to wait until two days before Christmas. While premature décor can be annoying, it’s never too early to shop for Christmas. Your customers know this, and while many will wait for Black Friday, others will buy before then. Replace your Halloween supplies with Christmas ones, just to be prepared.
- Adjust your landing page
While physical stores might put off customers by installing a tree too soon, websites have a free pass at creating a Christmas-themed section that users have the option of visiting. During the Christmas season, create a Christmas-themed landing page. Instead of using your generic home page, design a Christmas page and redirect traffic there once the Christmas season is underway. This way, anyone who searches your url will land here before they see anything else. Your Christmas page can highlight special offers.
- Include personal information
Consumers aren’t always curious about the face behind a website. If they really want to know who owns your shop, they can Google. That said, Christmas is about nostalgia and family, so it’s a good excuse to include some family photos or a web video. It makes you seem less like a soulless corporate and more like a friendly enterprise. This will evoke warm emotions that may translate into more sales this season.
- Display phone numbers
Whether they’re last minute shoppers or customers who stumbled into you via Google, Christmas shoppers have a lot of questions. They want to get just the right gift for their loved ones, so they can be nit-picky. Customer care bots and contact forms are convenient, but talking to an actual person makes all the difference and can massively boost sales. If you’re unsure about the cost and efficiency of a human phone operator, hire one just for Christmas. Assign a dedicated Christmas Hotline and put it on the landing page. You can always remove it after the holidays. It can come down with all the decorations.
- Use the right payment processor
The average business sells more at Christmas than any other time of the year. To facilitate these purchases, your credit card processor must be optimal. Get one that offers instant verification to avoid delays, entice impulse buyers, and get every possible customer before the Christmas sale deadline. Last-minute customers are already panicking, so reassure them with clearly displayed SSL certificates and superior data encryption. Your processor should have minimal rates and fees. This way, they won’t take too big a chunk of your Christmas bonus.
For more tips on selling online at Christmas, or to sign up for a merchant account, please call (888) 924-2743 or go to Charge.com.