Are you ready For Cyber Monday?

The first Monday in December traditionally marks the start of the Christmas season shopping spree and marks the busiest day online shopping day of the calendar.

By Guy Mucklow, CEO of Postcode Anywhere

During a frenzied day of bargain shopping dubbed “Cyber Monday”, millions of shoppers will be armed with credit cards and ready to buy from you, so it is critical that you are completely geared up to take advantage of the day.

Department store chain John Lewis predicts the busiest day in the run-up to Christmas will be ‘Cyber Sunday’, 1 December, when shoppers, equipped with one of the final pay packets of the year, will buy most of their presents. Whichever day it is, the question is will your website handle the influx of shoppers and more importantly can you convert these thrifty browsers into sales?

Ok, so it might be a bit late to make any major changes to your site before Christmas, but there is still time to make a few substantial tweaks.

The following are six no-brainer ways to turn your abandoned carts into completed sales, increase sales and revenue while spreading some holiday cheer!

Stay focused

Don’t distract your customers from anything else other than paying for their presents. It’s fine to include your normal site navigation in the checkout process – if you really must. But it’s not ok to include unrelated offers, links down the side or flashing banners. These will just distract your customers away from their purchase.

Test your servers

The number one starting point would be to make sure you’ve load testing your servers and find the tipping point so you can simulate the impact of traffic spikes.

If there are problems, work closely with your IT team to make improvements e.g. adding memory, clearing down redundant data. Look for anything that’s running on there that you don’t really need that’s eating up valuable resources. Stopping those services frees up resource your server can better use serving your customers.

Don’t over complicate it

The best forms will only ask for the information they absolutely need, splitting the process into manageable chunks. Using address auto-fill technology can save a significant amount of time by preventing your customers having to manually typing out their address.

Enforcing customers to sign-up before they buy is another huge no-no. The Christmas period is certainly not the time to conduct any kind of marketing research.

Show the status

Cyber Monday-shoppers are renowned for being an impatient bunch. So anything you can do to improve this is sure to win you some brownie points. Let your customers know where they are in the process. Use a progress bar or tell them what step they are on to stop them hitting that back button!

Details

In a bricks and mortar shop a customer can pick up, try on and hold their gifts. Online, they obviously won’t have this luxury so it is up to you to provide this experience for them. Customers respond more quickly to images than to text, therefore providing pictures of the products in the shopping carts will remind them of their purchase and the reason for it.

Deliver the goods

The main thing that will put off your shoppers this Christmas is the sometimes agonizing experience of delivery. It’s vital you are able to provide the customer with a choice of how their goods are delivered, offering the best level of customer service.

People are far more inclined to buy if they know exactly how long it will take to deliver, and if the gift is likely to arrive in time for the big day. Amazon fashion giant Karen Millen have both got this right and are very good at pointing out how quickly you can get your package with express shipping.

Giving your customers an agreed window of delivery is a great way of improving the level of customer service you can offer as a business. It’s not only a competitive advantage: it’s the kind of service consumers will expect when ordering online.

For more visit www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk