Etailers get ready for holiday season checklist

With the holiday season around the corner it’s no surprise; for Ecommerce stores this can be the most profitable time of the year. Not only there is a spike in visitors but also in sales numbers. While 2017 had a 16% sales increase, 2018 is expected to see a 22% increase for the holiday period.

Is your website ready to take on the traffic surge that every ecommerce store experiences during the season? These are some checkpoints  you might want to consider before putting up big sales on your website:

Is your team geared up for spikes

To avoid losing sales, ensure your website can handle traffic increases, especially when large promotions hit. Conduct stress testing and if need be commission new hardware or software well in advance of the holiday season. If you’re on the cloud, review performance expectations and SLAs with your provider and ensure that they have the capacity or elasticity to handle your peak load.

Can you avoid downtime

Any downtime on your website means that customers will go looking elsewhere. The key focus area should be ensuring your site can handle rapid and unexpected increases in demand. That demand can take two forms: desired demand, which should be scaled up Cyber Monday and undesired demand, which should be mitigated, like a cyberattack. You can get the security of knowing that your website will be prepared for the incoming flood of holiday shoppers.

Are you handling returns smoothly

At minimum, your ecommerce website should have a dedicated returns page explaining what can and can’t be returned, how long customers have to return an item, and the process for returning merchandise, and any associated costs like a restocking fee. Make sure your returns information is easy to find—put a link to your returns policy on your homepage. You could also consider including a link to the returns policy page on product pages or during the checkout process.

Turnaround time during spikes

With the increase in purchases comes a higher demand for fast and reliable customer support. Brands must be able to turnaround and respond to all queries and solve issues efficiently to provide a positive shopping experience to customers. You need to have a holiday turnaround strategy for dealing with transaction surges.

Multilingual customer support service

As per reports, 74% of customers were more likely to purchase from a company that offered post-sales support in their language. Whether your business is an already established one or not, multilingual customer assistance from the best multilingual call centers is imperative for you to ensuring that your business doesn’t stay stagnant and grows continuously. Opting for multiple language customer support will win you more customers and make the already existing ones more loyal towards your business and brand.

Test your shopping experience

When your about to hit the busiest shopping season of the year, the last thing you want is to  discover a fault or inefficiency with your website or the checkout process. Customers are using multiple devices for the shopping experiences more than ever -mobile, laptop, desktop and more. Mobile accounts for 38% of the sopping done whereas 59% to other browsing sessions.

Deploy Chatbots To Maximize Sales

According to study,  online stores can reduce about 29% of customer support expenses by opting for chatbots as the first time of customer service. This estimate could easily translate into billions in savings annually.  Chatbots work 24×7 and are an intelligent shopping assistants, have a great way of responding and nurturing potential leads that could be used after the holiday season.

Ensure you have an omni-channel customer service

Customer service is one of the most valuable tools in a business’s arsenal specially during the holidays, when customers come to browse, click, fret, or complete a purchase on site. The more easier and faster method your customer can reach to you, the happier and satisfied they will be. You need a solid customer service strategy to steer every query to you payment page. This is why you need pre-sales support, which is an absolute must for the holidays. And during the holiday free-for-all, every competitive edge counts.

Bring in Artificial Intelligence

According to a research by Accenture, “Artificial Intelligence could potentially boost profitability rates by an average of 38% across 16 industries by 2035.” Artificial Intelligence is now used to generate a personalised shopping experience for online shoppers that result in better conversions. AI is used to add more power to product suggestions. Holiday season offers the perfect backdrop for experimenting with AI powered shopping experiences.

Marketing Automation Can Help You Earn

By leveraging marketing automation a business can offload tediously repetitive tasks to tools that would handle them more efficiently – right from email workflows,  email replies, automated social media replied, scheduled social media posts etc. This efficiency ultimately translates into revenues and enhanced brand visibility.

Check your Shopping fulfillment

During the shopping season, retailers are literally racing to consumers’ doorsteps to meet the rising expectations. According to National Retail Federation consumer research, 68% of online shoppers expect free shipping and back out if shipping isn’t free. When it comes to fulfillment for e-commerce companies, retailers have a couple options: Keep it in house or outsource the task to a 3rd party logistics outsourcer.

Do you need to Outsource your Customer Service?

It goes without saying: Holidays are bonkers for ecommerce, there’s no better time to bring on an outsourced customer support team than during the ramp up to Thanksgiving,  Cyber Monday, Hanukkah and Christmas.

A third-party customer support partner can provide extended support for basic inquiries, shipping, and returns. This can help increase your customer satisfaction, give your business the competitive edge, and help convert those inquiries into sales — without any lost sleep.

To fall short on customer service is to fall short of the competition. VSynergize can help you significantly reduce your time, efforts, and expenses. We can get you started in 24-48 hrs, if you have any questions shoot us an email at info@vsynergize.com or call on +1-732-481-9424.