We are now deeply involved in this crucial period of business : Christmas will be there in a few days time. On Christmas period, some e-merchants will do almost 50% of their annual turnover so it’s very important to put in place any idea that can increase confidence in your product or service offer. By doing so, you will be more likely to sell to one of the 70%+ of people shopping online for Christmas in Western Europe. Here are 10 tips to implement rapidly to rock your Christmas period.

1. Learn to anticipate when people intend to shop online

Only experience can and should help you determine why and when people will come to your website to actually spend money. Though, some tools can help better anticipate it during the year. You can take an hour or two practicing advanced segmentation in Google Analytics and analysing previous Christmas periods so that you can adapt to the expactations of those visitors and increase your average revenue per visitor.

2. Implement product suggestions and feedback areas

To increase your average basket price, one of the best things to be done is to provide your visitors with a product suggestions area where an algorithm will suggest complementary items. This area can display different types of products, last bought by someone, or the best rated ones. Such “suggestion box” can be very efficient when associated to a feedback or comments area on product pages.

3. Showcase your special offers

Major e-commerce websites experienced that showcasing special offers regularly has a very strong impact on business. You can also add a count-down to your offer to increase the feeling of urgency. This can be an effective way to convince hesitant visitors. A free shipping weekend on the first week of December is also a good way to create a rush before it actualy gets urgent. Usually, Free shipping weekends are organised on the weekend when the last orders can be shipped with a guaranteed delivery before Christmas’ Eve. But you can also anticipate and do it on the first week of December to better distribute orders throughout the month. In any case, make sure you communicate about the operation 3 weeks in advance through all possible media including blogs, Twitter, Facebook and partners.

4. Put products images at work for you

Many blog posts have already covered the impact of loading speed e-commerce performances. Revenues are highly correlated to the time product page take to load in visitors web browsers. Experts have estimated that when pages load 100ms faster, e-merchants net revenue increase by 1% over a year. That said, we recommand that you take special care of your product images so that they are both helpful and lightweight for your visitors. The images should help reassure visitors by displaying the products from every possible angle, but they are certainly not meant to discourage people from visiting your website due to extensive load time. Images for the web should be around 100kb.

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