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Ready Your Ecommerce Website for the Holidays

DynamicWeb

The winter holidays and January sales are fast approaching, which means everyone has a lot of shopping to do. And that means a lot of shopping online.

1. Be Ready for Mobile.
Mobile is one of the top reasons for ecommerce growth in the holiday season. The mobile sector is growing in its share of online sales, compared to purchases on desktop. “Mobile” means more than phones, too. Tablet use, or “couch commerce,” has proven a relaxing way for consumers to shop. This variety of screen sizes underscores the importance for your ecommerce website to accommodate all shoppers, no matter what device they want to use.

2. Set Your Goals.
It’s easy to rush into the holiday season full of excitement about your new product offerings or your new website design, but then you forget to see how well they performed. Fortunately, a fully-featured ecommerce solution makes it easier than ever to track your sales and performance analytics. The first step is to set a goal for what you want to achieve over the holiday season. Then figure out what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are. These are the metrics that you use to determine if you’ve met your goals. When the holiday season rolls around, use your ecommerce website and the backend tools to deliver robust analytics and reports on what worked and what didn’t for your online business. What you learn from this holiday makes you even more prepared for the next and the one after that.

3. Plan Your Holiday Content.
If you’ve created or plan to create special content for the holidays or January sales, it’s time to get that ready. Don’t wait until the last minute. Your special content might be anything from a case study on a particularly Winter-appropriate product or a beautiful line of high-quality product images themed for the holidays. Whatever content you choose, make sure to create, upload, or update it in your content management system (CMS). A quality CMS allows you to prep all this great content and then decide at a later time to go live and update it on your ecommerce website. Plan ahead with marketing and your other teams to craft a schedule and decide the perfect time to begin your holiday push.

4. Plan Your Products.
When it comes to holiday shopping, perhaps more than any other time of year, customers want to know if an item is in stock and when it ships. For this, you want to make sure your ecommerce website is integrated with your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. The integration of your ERP and eCommerce website allows your customers to see updates to your constantly changing inventory in real-time, saving you the trouble of a customer accidentally buying the perfect holiday gift when it’s out of stock. And just as important, you want to offer a variety of shipping options with notifications for your customer when their items are shipped.

Happy Holidays and January sales!
For a happy, healthy, and profitable holiday season, it’s important to be prepared. Follow these tips to keep a step ahead of the holiday stampede. And if your current ecommerce site is unprepared for these tips, consider Dynamicweb eCommerce as a gift to yourself.

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