As the countdown for Christmas continues, you’ll want to do everything you can to be prepared for the increased traffic your e-commerce website will be attracting.
A reported 40% of holiday shopping occurring online in 2014 and with that number showing no signs of decreasing – holiday shopping in 2015 is expected to hit new heights. Which represents a huge opportunity for online businesses to increase their sales.
So how can you take advantage of the busiest time of the year? In this post I’ll outline three holiday optimisation tips to help you convert more online visitors into paying customers.
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1. Best Seller Lists
From the past year, you’ve probably gathered quite a lot of data to determine what your best selling products are and the ones which converted the most.
Similar to adding a ‘Gifts’ category, you could set up another one which highlights the most popular products based on the level of sales they’ve generated.
The great thing here, is that you can have this category available throughout the year – making it easy for people to purchase your most popular products.
2. Improve E-commerce Site Search
Sometimes your customers will know exactly what they want and head straight to the search bar to see if you’ve got it. However, bear in mind folks will most likely not be getting the spelling correct.
According to a study by the Bayard Institute, they found 70% of e-commerce websites require searches to be an exact match of how it’s spelled on their site. So if people are searching for a “writing desk” on your website, but you’re selling “writing tables” – they could hit dead-end and assume you don’t have any.
To prevent people from abandoning your online shop just because of a spelling error, install a search engine on your site where you can enable auto-completion to make sure they find the products they’re looking for.
3. Add personalised recommendations
Amazon is the trend setter here, where they’re constantly recommending products based on your purchasing history and what you’ve recently viewed.
Research by Bralliance indicates that up to 31% of e-commerce revenue came from product recommendation in Q4 2014. They also found out that the conversion rate was 5.5 times higher with personalised recommendations and even performed 1.7 times better when placed above the fold than below the fold.
For instance, if a customer just purchased a coffee machine – you could display complimentary items such as coffee beans, mugs or coffee grinders to tempt them into buying more from you.
Adding recommendations will definitely help to increase your average order value based on the statistics above – and can be implemented quite easily by installing a plugin on most e-commerce platforms.
While these tips are designed to increase your conversion, don’t forget to track the results to determine whether they’re working for you.
How about you? What optimisation tricks have you implemented?
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