Get tips on how to prepare your webshop for the Christmas season and optimise your online store to attract more customers and maximise sales during the peak period.
Thomas Haurum
I love Christmas. It’s a cosy time filled with wonderful gatherings with family and friends, fires in the fireplace and festive treats. However, I am not a fan of rushing around crowded department stores searching for gifts for those I care about the most. It can be a chaotic mix of impatient children and stressed parents tangled in ribbons. If you’re anything like me, you’ll go to great lengths to avoid just that.
That’s why you do your Christmas shopping online. It gives you peace and time to find the right presents, and you can even do it from your sofa while enjoying a mince pie and a cup of hot chocolate!
But when shopping moves online, customers give up a certain level of control. Will the perfect gifts actually arrive before Christmas Eve? Will they be nicely wrapped? And if you don’t quite get it right, can the gifts be returned after Christmas?
As a webshop owner, you need to anticipate these questions, and here are a number of tips on how to do just that!
When customers shop for Christmas online, answers to the above questions suddenly become critical in determining which webshops receive the most orders. You can do yourself, and your webshop, a huge favour by informing your visitors about:
Make this information as clear as possible, both on your homepage AND in your checkout process.
If you don’t meet your visitors’ need for clarity, you’re likely to lose out on a lot of sales – or spend most of December answering customer queries about these very questions.
How can you stay ahead?
There are several ways to do this. For example, you can collect all the key information in a top bar displayed on every page of your webshop. See an example of a top bar at www.nelly.com below:
You can also collect your most important information in a fixed bar at the bottom of your webshop. A fixed bar stays in place even when the visitor scrolls down the page. This is what www.coolshop.dk has done in the example below:
If you want to be absolutely certain your visitors are clear about what to expect when shopping on your webshop, you can also add a pop-up like this one:
A pop-up acts as a small standalone page that appears on screen, for example when a visitor is about to leave a page or has stayed on a page for a certain number of seconds. You can tailor your pop-ups (Sleeknote is a great tool) so they deliver exactly the messages you want, exactly when you want them to appear.
Don’t forget checkout
Even if you’ve worked hard to answer your visitors’ questions on-site, it’s important that at checkout you reassure them that their beautifully wrapped gifts will arrive on time and can be returned until mid-January. This provides that extra reassurance before customers are ready to enter their card details and click ‘pay’.
Here’s an example of the checkout flow at Magasin:
Now that you’ve encouraged customers to buy their Christmas gifts from your webshop, it’s important to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for.
We’re often inspired by others, so you can help customers by presenting a list of your webshop’s most popular products. This list can be sorted by gender and age group, depending on your product range.
Here’s another example from nelly.com:
Once you’ve shown your visitors your most popular products, and hopefully they’ve added some to their basket, you can try to increase your average order value.
This is best done at checkout, where the customer has almost made their purchase. Their wallet might already be out and card details entered, so don’t miss the opportunity to add an extra gift to their basket. At checkout, it’s a very good idea to show the customer offers or new products in the same category as those they’ve already selected.
See another example from Magasin here:
This way, you increase the chance of a larger order, and all your extra effort with free delivery, gift wrapping and returns until mid-January will really pay off.
Today, we as consumers spend almost more time online than offline – largely thanks to social media. If your webshop has a profile on, for example, Facebook or Instagram, it’s a good idea to update all your copy to include information about your Christmas sales. You can also update your cover and profile images to let your followers know what service they can expect from you over the festive period.
If you’re running special Christmas campaigns and your target audience is on Facebook, it’s also wise to advertise these through various ads that can run up to and during December.
Google Ads are the adverts that appear at the top of the search results when someone searches on Google. If you use Google Ads to promote your webshop, remember to update your ads before the Christmas rush begins. Again, you want to draw customers to your webshop with great products and offers, but also by answering their questions in advance.
That’s why the copy in your Google Ads and extensions should focus on when items are delivered, how they’re delivered, and your returns policy.
Our Google Ads experts are ready to help – contact us >>
With that said, there’s nothing left but to wish you good luck with your webshop’s Christmas sales!
– Feliz Navidad!
Read more – what you can do if you’re receiving few or hardly any orders in your webshop.
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