How To Get Your Online Store Ready For The Selling Holiday

The season of comforting autumn meals and gift-giving is nearly upon us, and eCommerce merchants everywhere are gearing up for one of the most significant shopping runs of the year. 

Particularly in a time when loved ones are not always close at hand to meet, a personalized Thanksgiving or Christmas gift can be the perfect way to send love, making web to print eCommerce shops one of the hottest choices for shoppers.

And as an eCommerce business eager to make the most of the rush, here is how to prepare for success by checking the following tasks off your list:

1. Get your inventory in place; prioritize festive products

The first step towards a successful holiday sale is to have enough items on hand to sell. The last thing you want is to run out of stocks before your sale has appropriately kicked off!

Use sales data to determine the designs and products that customers like best, particularly during the previous holiday seasons. Keep an eye out for current eCommerce and gifting trends as well, as customer tastes change all the time. Stock best-selling print products and offer print-ready template designs using a robust web-to-print solution.

You will also want to make sure that you have sufficient packaging material on hand, including boxes of various sizes and enough padding for fragile items to keep them safe during long transit times. Special festive wrapping paper and printed labels are also a good idea.

2. Announce sales and promote discounts

Now more than ever, shoppers will be looking for the best deals they can find. Rather than offering a blanket discount, however, it is best to have a strategy with multiple kinds of promotions for various periods.

Typically, limited-period offers tend to work better owing to the sense of urgency they create about something good lasting only for a while. You can also consider a variety of offers such as percentage discounts, buy-one-get-one, free gifts, and bundled deals.

Another option that customers like — especially during the holiday season — is to offer donations to charities of the customer’s choice for basket values above a threshold amount.

Be sure to promote all of the offers you run well in advance on your social media pages and websites, as well as in your email marketing campaign. Be aggressive and start soon so that you capitalize on the sales as much as you can. That brings us to the next point.

3. Prep your marketing materials and website banners

Speaking of promotion, you will want to get the word out there about your fantastic holiday products and offers well in advance. Therefore, invest time in building a content calendar ahead of the festive season and stick to a schedule for each platform you are using.

You will also want to upgrade your landing page and website banners on your web-to-print storefront to reflect the holiday mood as well as the offers you are running.

This is also a great time to invest in paid advertising, where you use attractive ads to pull new customers to your website (ask a paid advertising expert for help if your in-house team does not feel quite up to handling it).

Also, share compelling blog content with handy tips for customers, such as gift-buying guides, and subsequently increase your site traffic (and sales).

4. Automate wherever possible

There are always a thousand little things to do throughout the day for a printing eCommerce business, never more so than during the holidays. It helps immensely, therefore, to use automated software for routine tasks wherever feasible.

The thing is your customers want to be as independent as possible when they come to your print eCommerce store.

Therefore, please ensure that it is easy for them to browse through the print products, calculate the quotation in real-time, customize them using the product design tool, and place an order quickly with an efficient checkout. Convenience is key to minimizing cart abandonment rates.

On the other hand, chatbots can do a lot of the work to guide customers through website browsing and social media conversations, such as on Facebook Messenger. This is especially helpful from a marketing perspective.

Consider investing in one of the many chatbot-building platforms available to create a personalized assistant for your website.

Similarly, services such as MailChimp can also manage your email marketing campaigns for you. Social media automation tools like Hootsuite do a great job of automating your post uploads, managing comments, and providing you with up-to-date statistics on your page activity.

Not only does it make the buying journey much smoother for your customer, but also it frees you up from a lot of admin-related work, letting you focus on marketing and selling great print products without breaking a sweat.

5. Have a customer-friendly return policy

Although a design tool for printing businesses enables customers to personalize the products of their choice, view them in 3D and then place an order, it is possible they do not like the printed product when they receive it. 

It is never ideal when a customer wants to return something they bought from you. However, complicated or inflexible return policies are among the chief reasons many customers skip buying things online. With a web-to-print software solution, you can breathe easily.

Instead of fearing returns, make it easy for your shoppers by offering simple exchange, return and refund policies. Many of those returns may well be to replace something that is the wrong size or color or more in line with the recipient’s taste — especially now during the holidays. 

Simplify the returns and communicate your policy in terms everyone understands, and you will actually end up getting more sales and happier customers. Also, be sure to highlight the return/exchange option on the store so that your customers can perform the action efficiently.

6. Perform any migrations now

During the peak shopping season, it is evident that website traffic will be through the roof — with the right marketing gimmicks, of course. However, at the same time, you need to keep providing the responsive, user-friendly browsing experience that shoppers have come to expect.

If your current backend system cannot support that, now is the time — well in advance of the holidays — to migrate to a more robust eCommerce platform. The last thing you want is your holiday sales to suffer because of a page glitch, so take the time out now to avoid that.

7. Review your plugins

Plugins are an essential part of every eCommerce website and can add multiple extra features. Too many of them, however, and you run the risk of slowing the website down and annoying your shoppers. You do not want that!

Therefore, before the holiday season go through all your plugins and remove the ones that do not add any real value or involve too many database queries and scripts. This has the added advantage of improving your site security, which is important in eCommerce.

8. Optimize your checkout process

No matter how unique your products are, customers are unlikely to stay too long if your checkout process is not simple enough. As far as possible, let checkout be complete in just one or two pages, and be sure to highlight any extra charges on the first page itself clearly.

Adding a progress bar is also a smart option, as it lets your customers see how far they have to go. While it is easy to get overwhelmed by the chaos of holiday shopping, remember that slow and steady does the trick.

Entice your customers well in advance with suitable marketing materials, and they will be ready to flock to your website come Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Over to you

‘Tis the season to attract more customers and drive higher sales! Given that the past two years have been nothing less than a roller-coaster ride for us all, there will be increased aplomb during the holiday season. Therefore, please make the most of it.

Get your web-to-print storefront all set up and ready to attract customers and generate higher revenues in the next few remaining weeks of the year. However, if you are a print eCommerce shop in the eCommerce space that has not switched to web-to-print yet, now is the time.