The time is finally here – the height of the holiday season is in full effect, Christmas is just a few days away, and if you live on the East Coast of the United States, you are likely bundling up and shoveling snow out of your driveway. For everyone, particularly the many who have yet to buy presents and still need to, this next few weeks is going to be as stressful as it is relaxing and joyful. If you are a small business, you are likely trying to game-plan for how to best sell your services and wares while everyone is back home and looking for gifts. Considering the pandemic and the accelerated movement towards digital commerce, almost all businesses are trying to recoup some sales and sell products online. It makes sense: the holidays are a great time for marketing, because you can frame your products as gifts for loved ones or for the office.
If you are a small business with less experience in holiday e-commerce, you might want to review your platform and ready yourself for the holiday gift-buying rush. With the help of a software consultant, especially one with a background in e-commerce, you can prepare your business and your online shopping platform for the Christmas and holiday rush.
Preparing Your Website for Holiday Traffic
Financial analytics for 2020 are in, and they all point to a massive explosion in online and e-commerce sales. If you are a smart business, even if you don’t have the biggest platform or any corporate backing, you can cash in on the movement to buying in online with the right preparation. To do so, you can strategize with the help of a company focusing on software and digital strategies.
A priority for you and your business is going to be making sure your website can handle all of the last-minute holiday shopping traffic. And doing so is always easier said than done. Many non-technical consumers think of online shopping the way it is presented to them: as a tool to simply click, then buy products. However e-commerce is more than just a one-step process, in fact clicking “buy” on an item is really just the first step in getting the product from a warehouse to your home. The company selling the item is really the one responsible for filling out all of the other details to get the gift from point A to point B.
Data input is a key component in the process of e-commerce. If a company is not thorough in asking the customer for complete billing and shipping info, the warehouse housing the products can easily make mistakes shipping out packages and gifts. As a company, you want to make sure you are streamlining your e-commerce page towards data input, making it as simple and secure as possible for a customer to input all of his or her necessary information. A custom e-commerce developer can help you implement a CRM for online shopping, or review your existing system to make sure you don’t make any common mistakes in terms of shipping and data.
You would hate to under perform in sales by not fulfilling customer orders in a timely, organized manner.
Finally, a small business can increase the bandwidth of its e-commerce platform by working with a local software developer. Using basic software tools, an outside consultant can reshape and retool your webpage, making it easy and exciting for potential shoppers to browse your page. Especially if you are a small business, you would hate to limit the amount of revenue you can make this season by saddling customers with a slow, buggy e-commerce page.
Thankfully, there are steps you can take as a business to prepare yourself for the rush of holiday shopping, and ones you can implement almost immediately. If you have any doubts about your website or mobile application in terms of ability to complete sales and fulfill orders, consider reaching out to a software consultant with experience in e-commerce software. That way you can make online shopping easy for your customers, and shipping large amounts of inventory easy for your company.