Spruce Up Your Storefront to Meet Holiday Shopping Demand: Special eTaildTail Guest Commentary

I have a special Guest Blog Commentary for the eTaildTail community today from our friends at SLI Systems. 

It is great read and helpful for the holidays to increase Webstore conversions.

Happy reading!

- Chip Arndt

Spruce Up Your Storefront to Meet Holiday Shopping Demand

By Geoff Brash, VP of Marketing, SLI Systems

With the holidays just around the corner, below are some tips for how you can deliver the best possible online shopping experience for your customers, and capture your share of online sales.  All of these tips are fairly simple and can be implemented in little to no time, so there’s no time like the present to get started (if you haven’t already!).

1. Create a “gift finder”: A gift finder is a useful tool that helps online shoppers find just the right gifts for the various people on their holiday lists. It’s easy to deploy, and can be promoted throughout your site. Generally, gift finders let people narrow their search by certain criteria, such as price, who the recipient is (kids, friends, co-workers and so on), or gift type. They’re then presented with a list of all the products that match those criteria. To see a good example, check out the gift finder on Vivre (click on “Giving” at the top of the page).

2. Prepare your site for holiday traffic: Make sure your site infrastructure can cope with the onslaught of holiday shoppers – you don’t want the site to perform slowly -- or worse,  crash – when people are trying to buy. This is one area where it might make sense to use hosted ecommerce technology solutions, so your site performance won’t drag during peak traffic times.

3. Make sure your site search results are relevant: The holidays are a great time to gain new customers, but if people can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll quickly move to one of your competitors – and possibly never come back. Try searching your site yourself. Does your site search deliver results that are relevant? Can it account for spelling errors? Can you provide results for those “long-tail” terms that aren’t as commonly used but have higher conversion rates? If you answered no to any of these questions, you might consider finding a new site search provider – one that can get your site up and running in very little time.

4. Show off holiday specials: Promote holiday merchandise or holiday-related items with on-site banners or other highly visible promotional tools. And be sure to use search terms visitors use on your site in these banners, so your messaging resonates.  You could also place the banners on site search results pages, when you have a captive audience.  If you offer free shipping for holiday purchases, heavily promote that benefit as well.

5. Put keyword data to work: To improve the chance that your products will show up on the first or second page of search engine results, review your site search activity and create landing pages related to the consumers’ likely search terms. Since customers may not be familiar with the brand names of your company’s products, optimize your site for the terms your visitors actually use – those they enter in the search box on your site.

Are you doing anything differently this year than last, or did you try something last year that worked so well you’re going to repeat it this year?

If so, I’d love to hear from you. Please email me at geoff.brash AT sli-systems.com