Pandemic, a single-word horror story, finally seems like coming to an end. The Covid-19 pandemic shook the world with nearly affecting all the lives and industries. Not only shopping styles, but the pandemic and the social distancing rules changed the entire lifestyles of people. Though pandemic has helped eCommerce reach the levels it wasn’t projected to until 2025; it has also increased competition and challenges for store owners to a great extent.
After surging nearly 20% last year in light of the pandemic, US retail eCommerce is expected to see smaller but still significant 8.7% growth this year. Especially in the holiday season, eCommerce is projected to account for a record 18.9% of the total $206.8 billion in holiday sales projected for this year.
According to Deloitte’s holiday retail forecast, Holiday retail sales are likely to increase between 7% and 9% in 2021.
This holiday season is the prime opportunity to boost eCommerce sales with a robust strategy. The holiday season will begin with the biggest eCommerce festival this week. With increased demands, there is also a significant surge in expectations of the customers. The holiday season is the time when customers not only expect great offers but look for personalized services on the eCommerce store. Pandemic has changed the way people look at online shopping. Providing great offers will not do enough this holiday season. The store owners will be required to go a step ahead to convert a visitor into a customer and stay ahead of the competition. Here, we’ll provide specific tips that store owners can implement to beat the competition and win the customers this holiday season.
Prep Up for the Upcoming Traffic
Holiday Season brings the crazy shoppers. The traffic increases dramatically during the shopping days such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc. It must be ensured that there are no chances of site outages when customers are visiting the store. Ensure the store is up and running well, the inventory is stocked, evaluate the payment integrations of the store, double-check with your delivery partners, ensure the shipping process is sorted.
Level Up Customer Experience
Online shoppers nowadays want to get what they are looking for with just a few clicks. With features like Elastic Search, the search can be made extremely easy. Your store must provide a seamless shopping experience and a hassle-free path to checkout. Few of the quick to-do things can be testing the site speed, sending cart abandonment notifications, reevaluating the whole checkout process once more, personalizing the experience, upgrading the merchandising strategy, optimizing checkout, enabling guest checkout if you aren’t letting guests purchase, enable multi-recipient functionality, offer various payment options, allowing them to choose the shipping option.
Enable BOPIS (Buy Online Pickup In-Store)
It becomes challenging to make the deliveries in a day or make it quicker like the average day at peak times. Hence, allowing the shoppers to pick up from the store can impact your store and encourage the customers to make a purchase. This can help them have the product at the online offer price and receive it the same day.
2021 is the year when business owners and consumers are looking forward to the holiday season more than ever. Make sure you meet the expectations of your customers and achieve the goals of your store as well.
