The arrival of the holiday season enthuses both buyers and sellers alike. For consumers it means meeting friends and family, sharing gifts, shopping excursions, festivities and having enough time to indulge in their interests. Sellers, on the other hand, are excited about the possibility of business, selling more goods and maximizing profits. After all, at least half of the total annual sales happen around this time of the year. But to make the most of this once-in-a-year opportunity, sellers have to be well prepared. Especially, if you are into eCommerce and own a Magento store the preparations have to be more elaborate than any other business. This is simply because even a small outage on your Magento site during the holiday season may cost you dearly.

It makes great business sense to keep abreast with Magento holiday marketing tips. These industry best practices not only help you to prepare your eCommerce platform for the holiday surge, but also enable you to achieve your sales targets for the holiday season by minimizing technical snags and improving customer experience.

Prepare Your Store To Handle Search Queries

User experience is the key to success in eCommerce and this factor becomes all the more important in the holiday season. Your users expect nothing less than a Google-like experience and if you are not able to provide that, customers will abandon your eStore. A research by McKinsey suggests that it only takes a user 2 to 3 seconds to decide whether to continue shopping on a particular site or not. It simply means that if you are not able to impress your prospective customer within this time frame, he/she will move on to your next competitor. Research shows that 48% of product searches are done on mobile devices, which means that your Magento store should be mobile optimized as well.

In addition to taking care of things like page load speed, shopping cart and payment gateway, you also need to work on the search function of your Magento store. While on an average day an eCommerce store receives 500 to 700 search queries per second, during the holiday season, this rate may go as high as 3000 to 10000 queries per second. If your Magento store is not prepared to handle such a sharp increase in search queries, you may lose big time on sales. To make sure that your store is able to handle the holiday rush, hiring Magento development services of a reputed service provider is a good idea.

Master The Ranking Logic Of Your Store

Magento as an eCommerce platform offers a host of features to give you full control of your sales cycle. You can reorganize your storefront with a single click. To boost sales of certain products, you can also create scarcity by playing around with the ranking logic. To maximize your sales, you should have mastery over all the functionalities offered by Magento. If you just want to concentrate on your conversion rates and profit margins, outsourcing the technical bit of your business to a specialized service provider is a good idea. These vendors have Magento experts who can set the ranking logic in such a way that you are able to earn maximum profit from each sale. They are also well versed in the eCommerce marketing tips in holiday season and can apply those to your sales strategy.

Steer Clear Of Overselling

To accelerate the purchase decision of customers, merchants often create an artificial scarcity of certain products. While it works perfectly well as a marketing strategy, oftentimes sellers go overboard with this tactic and end up showing products that are out of stock and hence won’t be shipped. This is a trap that merchants need to avoid while trying to capitalize on the holiday season. It not only leads to customer dissatisfaction but also wastes your screen real estate on products that don’t generate any revenue.

While displaying your products on landing pages, search results and category pages, make sure that you do not expose out-of-stock items. This needs real-time updation of your inventory and an agile system to do so. Considering the frequency of transactions during the holiday season, you will be hard-pressed for time to handle all these functions. So, it makes sense to opt for the services of a reputed vendor.

Find Out The Needs Of Your Shoppers

Knowing the needs of your customers well in advance is the key to success in the holiday season. Once you have a clear understanding of what exactly your prospective buyers are looking for, you can bring your product offerings in sync with their needs. So, it makes great business sense to use your Magento search analytics to find out what your shoppers are searching for this holiday season. Analytics also give you critical insights into what your target audience is searching for and not finding. You can use these insights to plan your product catalogs and deals. Design your product categories to suit the needs of your customers.

Optimize Your Content And UI/UX

When it comes to online shopping it’s the content and UX/UX that prove to be the biggest drivers of sales. Both these factors work in tandem to navigate your prospective buyers from the search page to the “buy now” button. Content acts as a cheerful and helpful salesperson explaining all the salient features of your product and UI/UX makes the whole shopping experience hassle-free. Therefore, it makes sense to optimize your content for the upcoming holiday season. If you are not an expert at it, take the help of an expert agency. Similarly, every dollar that you spend on enhancing the user experience on your Magento site gives you $10 to $100 as ROI. Upgrading your Magento store to the latest version also enhances to overall look and feel of your web site. You can do so, by hiring Magento up-gradation services of a vendor of repute.

Magnomates is your trusted partner for outsourcing every service related to Magento. You can leverage our industry experience and expertise to get your store ready for the upcoming holiday season. For more information on our services drop a line at info@magnomates.com.