Prepare your online store for sales season
The end of November and the beginning of December is a time of increased sales in the online stores and
marketplaces. It is caused by many events, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas or Boxing Day.
Especially time-limited offers attract a large number of users. It is good to check if our online store
is ready for higher traffic.
Below we have described what you should pay attention to, due to preventing slowing down or outage of
our e-commerce and losing customers in such significant time for sales.
1. Check the efficiency of your online store
The efficiency of the online store is a key factor during the sales period. If products need too much time to be loaded or added to a basket, we can lose users’ attention. If we see any issues with fluent performance of our online store, it is good to contact our technical support or hosting provider. It is also a good idea to increase the capacity of the server or run REDIS that optimise the storing of our data, thanks to which we can accelerate our e-commerce.
2. Inform about planned sale
In order to encourage users to use your offer, tell them about scheduled discounts, new products or gift packages. Create banners matching your website to inform about the sale. Thanks to them you will simplify the path to reach discounted products. Send the newsletter to your customers and add information about the sale on your social media a few days before. To increase the reach of your offer, you can think about advertising campaigns in Google Ads, Facebook or Instagram.
3. Plan the order service
Increased number of orders means more work for you and your employees. Make sure that you have efficient resources and workload to face the challenge. It is also good to verify if you have enough products, especially those on special offer. Next significant thing is functional customer service and fast shipping. If you want to facilitate the process of shipping orders, think about integration with the delivery company thanks to which you can save some time. You should also check if documents like terms and conditions, privacy policy or return forms are easily accessible.
4. Verify if there are no errors in your store
This is the last call to check the technical condition of your online store. Think if the customers or employees informed you about any errors. Test sending emails, payments and any untypical functionalities that your e-commerce has. Remember that there’s no point to do updates of the store or modules on your own, especially in the time of increased sales. Such updates don’t always go as planned and often then require technical assistance. If you can’t verify problems in your online store by yourself, ask ecommerce specialists for an audit of the online store. There are many companies like software houses, interactive or marketing agencies that provide such services.
