It’s the season of shopping and more and more customers are flocking to purchase online. Here’s how small businesses and e-commerce sites can boost their holiday season sales.
Optimize For Mobile
Marketingland just released their Online Retail Shopping Report detailing e-commerce data from last week, including Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday. According to the data, mobile traffic outpaced desktop traffic and mobile devices accounted for over 60% of retail traffic last Thursday. If your e-commerce site isn’t mobile friendly or have a responsive design, you could lose traffic and sales to a site that is.
Integrate Social Media
Posting your items to social media is an excellent way to spread awareness but what is even better is adding social share buttons so your customers can post their products to social media. This is especially key for sites like Pinterest where many tech savvy users will collect their wish lists. You can also engage your followers with special social media promotions or special offers that link directly to your store.
Check Your Site’s Load Time
This time of year is extremely busy for people and having a slow-loading site will keep visitors off your site and away from your store for good. A study by Kissmetrics said that 40% of visitors will leave if a site doesn’t load within 3 seconds and 79% of visitors won’t return if they are unhappy with your site’s load time. Ensure that your site has traffic management tools and optimization tools installed so that you or your webmaster is alerted when your site is down or sluggish.
Have An Easy Check Out Process
Online shopping cart rates can have a high abandonment rate and that can cost you money in your bottom line. Make your check out process easy and intuitive by having an option for guest check out, showing a progress bar, accepting multiple forms of payment and reinforcing trust with security badges.
Experts are predicting that e-commerce will only continue to grow in popularity and that more and more customers will abandon in-store visits in favor so do your business and your customers a favor by ensuring that your e-commerce site is fast, easy to use and gives your customers exactly what they want!
