Avex Designs
Avex Designs - NYC Digital Agency

As the holiday online shopping season quickly approaches, it’s critical your ecommerce site is ready for a deluge of web traffic. Not only does your site need to look good, but it needs to be optimized to make money.The following ecommerce optimization tips are based on what today’s customer expects when they hop on the web to shop from their mobile phones.

1. Personalize Product Recommendations on the Front Page

Even customers who normally take their time when making product decisions are in a hurry at this time of year. Add products to the front page based on previous orders and items they’ve looked at in detail. People need to get to what they want and checkout quickly. 

2. Don’t Let Customers Abandon Their Carts

The holiday rush also means plenty of abandoned shopping carts. Send an abandoned cart email series instead of a single email. Give time-crunched shoppers the chance to purchase that perfect gift before it’s too late.

3. Streamline the Checkout Process

Research estimates that 33% of all retail transactions in the US will be completed via mobile devices. Make the checkout process as painless as possible by asking for as little information as possible. Don’t include additional screens or fields. Pop-up boxes are an alternative, but they must keep the mobile customer in mind.

4. Setup Website Monitoring Software

Amazon Prime Day got off to a rocky start this year when customers couldn’t access the site to get in on top deals. This time of year is often the most profitable for ecommerce, and minutes of website downtime could cost you big. Investing in web monitoring software alerts you of outages before your potential customers go elsewhere.

5. Improve Your Sales Conversion Funnel

If you’re converting less than 2% of your web traffic into sales, shoppers are getting lost somewhere on your site. In a nutshell, testing your conversion process involves collecting data and gathering information from customers and website users. With this data, you can know which technical errors to fix, such as broken links or device/browser incompatibility issues.

6. A/B Test Product Pages

Product pages are at the heart of every purchase. Focus your attention on creating the best version possible by A/B testing product pages. Testing ensures the best combination of copy, images, and buttons for every product.

7. Optimize Your Site for Speed

With mobile shopping at an all-time high, many shoppers aren’t going to wait for your site to finish loading when they can go elsewhere. Speed is also an SEO factor.

Get your site to load faster by:

• Cleaning up your site’s code.
• Compressing images.
• Staying away from hero sliders.
• Keeping third-party apps and plugins to a minimum.

8. Sell Directly on Facebook

Facebook rewards ecommerce companies that sell on Facebook Pages. Shopify makes it easy to integrate your Facebook Store into the platform to bring a unified look and feel to customers.

9. Use Retargeting Campaigns to Bring Back Potential Buyers

Over 75% of ecommerce customers abandon shopping carts. Retargeting is a way to bring back a quarter of those customers. Instead of showing a generic ad, ecommerce companies can use retargeting (or remarketing) to display personalized ads to potential buyers based on previous orders or items they’ve viewed. Facebook is a great place for affordable marketing with tons of active users.

Combine these with an abandoned cart email sequences to give customers plenty of opportunities to check out.

10. Focus on User Experience to Make Shopping Easy

Some of the above suggestions focus on single aspects of user experience (UX). But every aspect of your website must reflect what users want and expect. The path to purchase needs to be clear from the front page. Broken links and forms are a no-no.

Wrapping It Up

Now is the time to get your website in shape for the season. If you’re ready to get your online shopping site working like an ATM, try the above tips to experience your best end-of-year sales ever.

10 Ecommerce Optimization Tips for 2018
Morgan C