Optimising Your Online Store For Christmas

November 18, 2015

Christmas is fast approaching and is one of the busiest shopping periods of the year with billions spent in gifts and in sales. A whopping £17billion is predicted to be spent online by Britons over the Christmas period and no doubt you’ll want a chunk of that.

With only a few weeks left to Christmas now is the time to be setting up your online store for Christmas success. Here’s a few handy tips and tweaks to make over the coming weeks to make sure it’s jingle all the way, and not a lump of coal in the stocking.

Promote Popular Products
Actively push your products through the home page of your site, and on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. If you’ve got Analytics set up you’ll be able to see the kind of products people most often search for and buy, and make sure these are pushed front and centre during the season.

Optimise Your Products
Make sure your products are SEO friendly so you can be found through Google. There’s many more elements involved but for the basics it’s making sure you have a clear unique description for your products, something a bit more descriptive than “pack of 10”, an informative name, and properly named product images. Applying features like Schema to your products help highlight price

Check Your Payment Systems
Making sure that the customer can actually pay for the items they’ve picked up should be a top priority. Make sure your site is set up to accept popular credit and debit cards, as well as options for online payment services such as PayPal which are increasingly popular. Once you have everything set up make a test run with a product to make sure there’s no issues with payment being processed. A customer hitting problems is likely to become frustrated and leave and few will report the issue.

Build Up Blog With Gift Lists & Ideas
If your site has a blog it’s great place to put Christmas themed content to highlight particular products. Make up lists such as “Great gifts for the kids”, “Simple stocking fillers”. This kind of content is great for sharing and highly informative and relevant for the season. If you include more than the scope of products you sell, assuming you serve a specific niche, it can be all the more useful for prospective visitors and customers.

With a bit of extra care and work you can make your website have a Merry Christmas with happy customers and busy elves sending out presents to all.