Now Black Friday and Cyber Monday have both been and gone, it’s a non-stop, break-neck run up to Christmas.
You’ve done so much preparation already – after all, between one fifth and one third of UK retail sales happen over the festive season – but here are 7 check-points just to make sure you’re truly ready for a cracking Christmas.
1.Does your site say “Christmas”?
It’s the online equivalent of getting the box of decorations out of the attic, checking if the lights still work and wondering how all those baubles broke.
You can go cheerfully, gloriously tacky or be elegantly understated, but your website needs to be festive. Help shoppers into the buying mood with a Christmas landing page.
2.Don’t risk a Lost Christmas
The closer to Christmas it gets, the more concerned shoppers are about delivery. Undoubtedly the press will run stories about postal strikes and under-resourced couriers.
Put your customers at ease by prominently displaying your last shipping dates to ensure a pre-Christmas delivery.
3.Have you done your Christmas stocking?
Nothing is worse than selling out in the middle of your busiest period. Not only have you lost that sale, but you’ve disappointed a potential customer and lost future sales, too.
Check and check and check your stock levels to make sure you have the products you need to meet the demand you expect (and a bit more).
The festive season can be hard on cash flow. Often you need to pay for Christmas-level stock before the Christmas-level cash starts coming in. Why not check out
PayPal Working Capital as a possible source of fast and easy funding for your inventory?
4.It’s Christmas, be more social
Now is a great time to ramp-up your social media activity. Get engaged with your customers and remember social media is a two-way conversation.
Our new ebook,
How to sell like Christmas all year round, includes some useful tips for social media selling. It can help you decide which channels to focus on, and how to make your online conversations work for you.
As TheWorks.co.uk’s Multi-Channel Director, Simon Joseph, says:
“As a progressive ecommerce channel, we want to be wherever our customers are.”
5.Be someone’s “Different”
Do you ever despair of finding that unique gift for a loved one?
Everyone else is the same. But, ecommerce opens shoppers’ horizons and they are increasingly looking across borders for that perfect pressy. According to research firm Forrester cross-border ecommerce will outpace domestic growth, with a compound annual growth rate of 17% between 2017 and 2022.
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People shop across borders to find goods not available in their own markets or to benefit from lower prices. As you consider your Seasonal selling strategy, consider international shoppers, too. Our How to sell like Christmas all year round
ebook, includes advice and links to other resources to help you get started with international sales.
6.Would you like that gift-wrapped?
If you offer gift-wrapping (or any other service), make sure you promote the fact often and early in the shopping journey. It can generate additional revenue while providing a valuable service to stressed-out shoppers.
7.Test, test, test
We’ve said this before, but be sure you thoroughly test every stage of your customer journey. You may not be expecting the extreme peaks of a single event like Black Friday, but as the big day approaches shoppers are increasingly stressed and much less tolerant of hitches and glitches.
Remember, you risk losing more than the single Christmas sale. Great service quickly builds customer loyalty and a poor experience can lose you a customer’s life-time value.
Click here for a copy of How to sell like Christmas all year round. It’s packed with ideas to help you maximise your festive season sales … and to extend them all the year round.