Get your E-commerce Store ready for the Holidays!

You’re less than a month away from the Holiday season and it’s time to get your e-commerce website ready. A lot of holiday shoppers prefer the ease of shopping online so they don’t have to queue up outside a brick and mortar store. You can make their online shopping experience more enjoyable by sprucing up your e-commerce store for the Holiday season.

1) Can your search bar handle the heat?

If you’ve got lots of products on your e-commerce website, online shoppers will use the search bar to search for a specific product they want in your online store. So here’s what your website search bar should do:

• Handle common spelling mistakes and synonyms for a particular product. Like a search for hair combs should also yield results for hair brushes.
• Make sure your search bar doesn’t just yield product results. Let’s say the user types out ‘return policies’ the search bar should take him to a page on your site that talks about the return policies of your store.
• Optimize your product keywords based on the search terms that are returning zero results. Let’s say a term “one shoulder top” might be returning zero results. This is because your tops might be listed under “off shoulder tops” You can optimize the product for this keyword for better results.

An easy way to edit all your meta data quickly is with Axis meta plugin for Joomla. This plugin helps you modify and manage all your metadata in a single page quickly. Download the plugin and bulk edit all your metadata quickly for better SEO.

You should also check the kind of filters your store has and optimize those filters for better navigation and search.

2) Segmenting your Landing pages.

A better way to improve conversions is to allow the user to create a tailored experience for himself on your e-commerce website. So creating different landing pages for different groups of customers will lead them to that part of your site that is most relevant to them.

• Let’s say when a user that lands on your page, you can allow him to choose if he’s there ‘to sell’ or ‘to buy’. This works of course only for e-commerce stores following the marketplace model. From then on a person who wants to buy can be taken to a page that shows him different product categories he’s interested in. A seller will be taken to a page where he can either register his new business or just add products to his existing account.

3) Make Seasonal Content Offers

Now since the holiday season comes during the winter for Northern Hemisphere you can promote your winter clothing aggressively. Normally prices are hiked up during this season, but you can also place offers or give out special coupons/gift certificates to special customers.

You can also introduce amazing discounts on the summer and spring wear. This will keep the sales for those seasonal items going strong too. Promote your offers aggressively on your site and all social networks.

4) Inform your customers of how long shipping will take

Since it’s the festive season, users will want their products to be delivered before Christmas or New Year. Now this might or might not be possible for you when you have orders over flowing. So make sure you inform your customers of how long shipping will take.

• You can also include a shipping calendar in to your site. You can also accept delivery date input from the user. The user can specify when he wants the product delivered. You can also charge an additional fee for users who want their products shipped immediately.

5) Make your website more festive

Give your website a makeover and welcome the festive season. A more attractive website that displays some festivity is sure to attract more conversions. Add great visuals and spend sometime and cash on redesigning your site. Add image carousels and display high quality images beautifully.

6) Promote all your offers on your homepage

Your homepage should clearly display all the holiday offers when a user lands on your page. You can add a slider banner to your homepage and display your offers in an eye-catching fashion.

You can spruce up your website in time for the holidays with Themeparrot templates and themes. They are easy to setup and you get a lot of design and customization options. You can add beautiful images in slide banner or carousel.

Sign up for the J2Store Pro membership in time and you can have your e-commerce site ready for the Holidays!