The last day of summer was just last week. But even though we are in the very beginning of the autumn season, it’s time to start getting ready for the holidays.

It might be difficult to plan for the end of the year when you haven’t even gotten your winter coats out of the attic, but being properly prepared will put you in the best position to capitalize on the most profitable time of year for an ecommerce website.

There are various aspects of your ecommerce web design that can help your Nashville business better serve your customers and create return business.

Here are 9 tips to prepare your ecommerce website for the upcoming holidays:

 

Streamline Your Infrastructure

Check the Speed of Your Website

The speed of your website has a direct relationship to how easy it is to use. And potential customers can quickly grow annoyed with a website that lags when loading new pages.

There are a variety of ways you can optimize the speed of your website. Click here to read more about what you can do.

Basic functionality of ecommerce web design is the first step toward preparing for a successful holiday season.

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Make Sure Your Web Design is Responsive

Responsive web design means your website is easily viewed on a variety of screen sizes. There are many different ways a person can access the internet — laptop, desktop, tablet, phone.

The device used affects how your website will look.

A static design will not work across all available screen sizes.

There are currently 166.7 million people in the US that make purchases with a mobile device. Make sure your website is easily-viewed on all screen sizes.

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Update Your Inventory

Nothing hurts customer satisfaction like an unfulfilled order. You need to know exactly what you have on hand and verify your website reflects this availability.

Remove listings for out-of-stock items. Make sure all available products have current and active listings.

This is your chance to overhaul your stock. Find out exactly what you have and make sure your store listings reflect it.

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Align Your Marketing

Plan Out Sales & Discounts

People love a deal. This is why so many businesses roll out holiday sales and discounts.

You should have these considerations planned, scheduled, and ready for implementation.

Check your available stock and put anything on sale that is either in great supply, or perfectly-suited for the holiday season.

And then prepare special advertisements and online posts to let people know about them.

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Construct a Marketing Calendar

Paid ads, inbound marketing, and social media posts should all be done in accordance with each other.

What are you planning to push? Which items do you expect to be popular? What do your customers need to know to set you apart from your competition?

Create a detailed calendar of your various marketing efforts to make sure your customers are well-informed about your offerings.

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Create Dedicated Landing Pages

Specific pages dedicated to either sales or particular items are a great way to draw attention to special offerings.

This is a great destination to point toward from your internet marketing methods. It also helps draw attention from an SEO perspective.

Create a catchy headline that lets the customer know what to expect from the rest of the page.

A special offer landing page is a great tool for ecommerce web design to gain the attention of your audience.

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Prepare Your Customer Service

Update Your Return Policy

Customer hesitation is a major hurdle for ecommerce web design that isn’t a factor for brick-and-mortar stores.

Online shoppers are making purchases based on trust. They have to believe the item will reflect what they saw on the website.

A reasonable and easily-found return policy ensures your customers that you will gladly take the item back if there’s any problem whatsoever.

This has the potential to remove any doubt a person might have before a purchase.

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Make It Easy to Find Answers

Online retailers also don’t have the benefit of in-person associates that can quickly answer any customer questions.

This can be mitigated with a thorough FAQ section, chatbot, or easily-found customer service number.

People are going to have questions. And they aren’t going to complete a transaction without an answer.

Providing the tools needed to answer their own questions or making your team available will benefit both the customer as well as your business.

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Streamline the Checkout Process

Checking out is the last step to the ecommerce sales process. Convoluted and difficult checkout processes can convince a potential customer to cancel their order altogether.

Don’t worry about capturing their information. Make it easy to check out as a guest.

Offer multiple payment and shipping methods.

Give them the choice to create an account for future checkouts, but don’t make it intrusive.

Keeping this process simple will speed the customer toward completing their order.

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Ecommerce web development has a huge impact on how successful your business can be. Working with an experienced and expert web design company like Horton Group in Nashville gives you the edge in creating the best possible experience for your customers.

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