Success With Shopify by lhywantk - HTML preview

Chapter 22:

Holiday selling

If you have an online store, one of the things that you’re going to look forward to every year (more than usual even) is the holiday season. Holiday sales are always higher than other times of the year, for nearly every niche out there, and some companies even make the majority of their revenue for the entire year during the holiday season. You can take advantage of this shopping boom if you are prepared and set to go, and luckily, the fact that you have a Shopify store allows you to get ahead of much of the competition.

How Much of a Sales Boost Can You Expect?

Ecommerce holiday sales are going to be bigger than ever and that is going to be the case for some time to come. Traditionally, people spent most of their holiday money in brick-and-mortar stores but as people become busier and it becomes easier to order online – particularly with the huge boom of mobile ordering – the ecommerce route is going to be the way that nearly everyone goes in coming years and retailers are switching their holiday focus to online shopping. It will depend upon your particular niche how much of a boost you will see over your regular sales, as well as your marketing efforts and products that you are listing, but if you have an ecommerce website you are poised to be there when holiday shoppers go searching for gifts.

Tips on Making the Most of Your Holiday Season

There are definitely some ways that you can improve your chances of having a successful and rewarding holiday season with your e-store. Here are some tips to help you make the most of the upcoming holiday shopping boom.

Mobile Shopping

One of the major advantages that Shopify gives you is that you have a responsive website and checkout that will work on any mobile device. That’s good, because in previous years holiday shopping on mobile devices increased by nearly 50%. The projections for upcoming years say that if your website isn’t responsive and your checkout process isn’t mobile-friendly, you aren’t going to be able to compete with other ecommerce websites when the holidays roll around.

Preparing Early

The second tip that you’ll want to follow is to get started early. This doesn’t mean starting in November, or even October. You want to actually prepare for the upcoming holiday season six months in advance. That includes ensuring that your mobile checkout works properly, that you know what sort of marketing methods you are going to be using to advertise for the holidays and that you have everything in place for the season when it gets here.

Part of that is because there are probably going to be twice as many things to do to prepare – particularly if this is your first holiday season – than you expect there to be and the other reason is that people tend to start their shopping early. By the beginning of November, you should be launching your holiday campaigns, not just getting started on them. If you start in November, you are going to miss the holiday shopping season altogether.

Change Website Copy

The holidays are the time to spruce up bland website copy and even change much of it to reflect the shopping season. The benefit of this is that you’ll get a boost for having new content which means more search traffic and in addition, you’ll be able to insert holiday keywords that you know people are searching for.

With Shopify, you can import your products from a format like a CSV file. The benefit of doing this is that you can change certain elements, such as the description of a product or group of products and then save it for later. For example, some people have several sets of product descriptions for the same products that they import depending upon the season. With holiday shopping this is a great way to optimize your site for the hordes of ecommerce shoppers. If you don’t have a CSV with your product information on it, you can export your list of products to a file like this and then change the descriptions and import the new descriptions all at once.

Point out Gifts

Another great use of the visual elements and text is to remind people that certain items make great gifts. Of course, this can work at any time of the year, as people look for wedding gifts, birthday gifts and more all throughout the year, but it is most effective during the holiday season. If you can choose certain products that you think would make great gifts and then add a graphic or line of text somewhere in the description that reminds people of how great of a gift the product would make you will see an increase in your sales during the holiday season.

Use Your Social Media Power to Remind Shoppers

Another way that you can increase sales is by using your social media platforms to remind people that they need to buy a gift. The trick here is to appear subtle while making sure that they get the message. One way to do this is by discussing the upcoming holiday season on social media or create lists of gift ideas on your blog. You don’t have to beat your followers over the head with the fact that you have a store selling great holiday gift items, but you do want to make sure that they remember once in a while so that you have a chance of converting them.

Decorate for the Holidays

Consider changing your theme or doing some customization for the holiday season. That way, when people visit your store they are reminded of the gifts that they need to purchase in the near future and will be apt to look at some of the gift ideas that you have to offer, even if they had originally come to your store for non-holiday shopping.