Tom Cahalan, managing director for Lost Ferret, describes the eight things that you really must be doing to help customers buy from you at Christmas.
• Christmas is a stressful time for customers, as they are under time pressure and mainly buying for other people, which is never easy.
Make sure it’s clear when they can expect their goods to arrive, so your customer service can be helping customers buy, rather than assisting with missing parcels
• Get the cash: are you offering enough payment options to your target audience? PayPal? Amazon Checkout? Over the phone payments. Never stop your customers wanting to pay
• Never make your customers register. Years after this has become common practice, it is still far too popular on websites to force your customers to register, when all research points to it causing a drop in completion rates
• Your website is no longer a single point of access, so on the lines of getting the cash, make sure you’re not just looking at one place to get it. Can your customers buy in store? Delivery to store?
Can they buy your items on Amazon, eBay, Debenhams or one of many 3rd party sites? The web is now a part of your entire retail strategy and should never exist in isolation.
• With more and more sales being made on the move, make sure your site is accessible and easy to use through a mobile device. This is not just about optimising your site for mobile, but also building mobile apps, so that customers then have a choice.
• Focus ruthlessly on conversion rates and see what can be done to improve it. Consumers need to make purchases but are likely to have even less patience than normal with anything that interrupts their idea of an easy ride.
Speed is critical: recent findings have shown 40% of people will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load and 52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site*
• Christmas is expensive enough without unreasonable delivery charges, particularly when these are not clear until after the customer has entered their payment details.
The obvious answer is to make shipping free for your basic service. Amazon once famously cut their entire marketing budget in order to offer free shipping to customers, and that worked out pretty well.
• Consumers may want to do all their buying at once but this is rarely successful; there will always be last minute presents to buy, so why not email customers who have already bought something and remind them you are still here, and perhaps offer something extra such as a promotional code.
LostFerret.co.uk
As well as clearly showing delivery dates also clearly display your returns information, many customers will want the peace of mind that they can return items after Christmas even if they have no intention of doing so.
I agree I think when it comes to the festive period shoppers aren’t within their usual mindset, they are often willing to pay more or less for a product, and extra services such as gift wrapping. I also completely agree that speed is critical, especially over the holidays, I myself have abandoned tons of checkout processes in the past because of the lengthy process. Personally I know I need good ecommerce software to enable me to hit all the targets mentioned above and here. Thanks for sharing, Sally.