The holiday season is once again upon us. Regardless of how you did last year, you want to do better, not only by profit margins, but also to make it easier and less stressful. Unfortunately, there is really no way to make getting your eCommerce store ready less stressful for Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM). However, you can take a lot of the sting out of it by following a few of these simple tips.
Get Started Now
Approximately 40 to 50% of holiday consumers start researching products, stores, and prices as early as the beginning of October. If you want to get a leg up on the competition, you should start leaving breadcrumb trails for visitors to follow. Talk about upcoming sales, new products that will be coming in and other promotions.
Stay Organized and Make A Plan
A smart eCommerce business owner knows the importance of proper planning. By staying organized, you can take the headache out of planning your upcoming sales. Case in point, take stock of your current inventory and schedule sales around the items that you want to move. Place them in an excel or Google spreadsheet with the sale dates and sale prices. Check your sheet weekly and make the necessary changes based on the information in your sheet. This cuts down the amount of time you have to spend creating online sales. It also frees up space for incoming products for BFCM.
Fine Tune Your eCommerce Site
The holidays always lead to major surges in website traffic. The last thing you want to have happen is the increased traffic slowing down, or worse yet, crash your site. You can jump over to Blitz.io or Loadimpact.com to test your site and see just how much it can handle. If you’re using Shopify, you should be fine as these merchants regularly experience high traffic surges and never have an issue. If you find that your site cannot handle the traffic you’re expecting, contact your service provider and see what options they have as far as increasing your bandwidth or troubleshooting your network to smooth out the wrinkles.
Create Your Ads in Advance
One of the biggest advantages major retailers have over smaller businesses and eCommerce businesses, is experience. They’ve learned how important it is to plan ahead. For example, those big holiday ads you see on television from Macy’s, Target and Kohl’s, are planned months in advance. When I say months, I mean they started working on the concept of those ads back in February or March. The more time you can spend slowly planning your ads and your ad copy, the more successful it is going to be. You want something that generates buzz and anticipation. Not only that, but it also has to be likable. The more likable you make the ad, the more likely people are going to reference it and share it. This means a greater return on your ad investment.
Conclusion
Obviously, there are more things than need to be done to get your eCommerce store into tip-top BFCM shape, but these tips should be enough to help get the ball rolling and make life much easier, and more successful for you.
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