New Year’s is fast approaching and the opening of a chaotic week of shopping, giving buyers the best possible deals they won’t be able to get on any other day of the holiday season. Even if you are a small business – correct that – especially if you are a small business, you need to know how to capitalize on this so that the bigger, mass market products aren’t the only ones making a pretty penny.
Online sales are growing on a global scale by billions of dollars every year with 2014 set to have an all-time high on sales. Without doubt the month of December and this week specifically are when most of these sales are bound to happen.
Being small and personal as a business doesn’t mean that you can’t also add online or cyber sales as an aspect of your operations. Why do people always have to come to you? Why can’t you offer them the opportunity of buying on the go or from the comfort of their homes? They will still be busy shopping but not necessarily crowding your store when they would rather not.
Assuming you have invested in a low cost online payment gateway, here are a few ways you can be prepared for extremely busy online sales during this most active week of shopping:
- Ensure your backend is doubly prepared for increased traffic so that your site doesn’t crash. You can’t afford to lose out on all online sales if this happens.
- Your site needs to have date specific deals so be ready to update your site on a daily basis, reminding customers of the time specific offers. Ensure the date is clearly marked on your site every day to coincide with the offers.
- If you have a complicated process from getting your shopper from the basket to the checkout, you may have resultant cart abandonments in the middle of the process. Simplify how your customer gets from interest to purchase in no time.
- Is your site optimized for all mediums from desktops to smartphones? A lot of shoppers are going to be doing their browsing and even buying online via their phones and your site needs to be responsive to any device it is accessed on
What plans do you have in place to ensure one-time New Year’s shoppers convert into long-term customers with you? Can you ask them to sign up for your newsletters and other content when they make a purchase? Can you automatically use their details to do this and send them content anyway with opt-in forms?
