The holidays are upon us again: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, the list goes on.
As a Shopify merchant, this should be an exciting time for you.
Or is it?
Well, it depends on how you choose to see it.
On the bright side, holidays are generally the busiest times for e-commerce, as sales tend to reach their peak during these periods.
You don’t have to take our word at face value; we have concrete facts to back that claim up.
Here are some of them:
- In 2021, US consumers went online and spent a total of $211billion on holiday purchases
- Holiday retail sales – online and offline – are expected to hit an all-time high of $1.3trillion in the US alone. E-commerce will account for about 20% of these sales.
These stats prove one thing: a lot of sales will be made this holiday.
Now, on the not-too-bright, there will be a lot of competition – and it will be fierce.
The only way to get ahead of this competition and get your fair share of the massive holiday sales is by prepping your online store.
And that’s exactly what this post is about: to give you tips to make the most sales during the forthcoming holiday sales period. So stick around!
7 Tips to Prep Your Shopify Store for the Holiday Season
“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
Those are the wise words of Alan Lakein, a notable US author. And they couldn’t be more true, especially when it comes to e-commerce. You just can’t afford not to plan your moves if you plan to win this holiday season.
That being said, here are seven tips to prep your Shopify store for massive sales this holiday season.
1. Optimize Your Shopify Website for SEO
Search still remains one of the top traffic sources for e-Commerce stores. So you can expect that much of your traffic will come from search engines like Google and Bing.
Nevertheless, search traffic won’t magically surge to your website if you don’t put in the mechanism required to make that happen.
What to do?
Optimize your Shopify website for SEO!
Sounds like so much work? Well, it isn’t. While SEO may have its technical sides, the good news is that just about anyone can do SEO, even if you are just a rookie.
The easiest way to optimize your Shopify website for the holiday season is by infusing relevant keywords into your page titles, headings, product descriptions, and any other place where Google search crawlers can easily find them.
Mind you, by “relevant keywords” we mean terms searchers will likely key into Google to find your website or products this holiday season.
Stuck on ideas? Here are some keywords you can target:
- Best Black Friday deals
- Cyber Monday deals
- Christmas specials
- Black Fridays discounts
Let’s say you sell sneakers. You could add “best black Friday sneaker deals” or “buy with the help of BnB wallet” to your page headings or product descriptions to attract search traffic.
Do you get the idea?
2. Create Custom Recommendation Campaigns
With Adoric’s Product Recommendation, you can create tailored campaigns to attract Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers.
The Home Page Recently Viewed campaign, for instance, lets you bundle your recently viewed products into a display for your shoppers. They can sample what other buyers have checked out, fueling their desire to purchase similar items.
Studies show that 71% of consumers get frustrated with unpersonalized product offers. In other words, online shoppers love personalized shopping experience.
As a merchant, personalizing your shoppers’ experience will cost you money. But will it be worth it? You bet it will.
On Adoric, you can deploy a range of personalized campaigns including:
- Home page best sellers (which brings your top performing products on your home page).
- Home page recently viewed (which allows shoppers see what other customers are viewing).
- Bought together with products (with this campaign, your shoppers can see other products that are frequently purchased alongside their chosen products).
- Collection bestsellers (top-selling collections of products)
You can also customize your campaigns to display on your Shopify store’s home page, collection page, product page, or cart page. This buoys your buyers’ seamless experience, helping them purchase holiday offers better and faster.
3. Deploy Eye-catching Popups
It’s one thing to build traffic to your website; it’s yet another to convert that traffic into sales. This is because your efforts won’t amount to much if you only get traffic but can’t convert that traffic into sales.
This is where popups come into play.
Popups allow you to convert your traffic into subscriptions and sales easily.
Here is a good one you can take inspiration from
Won’t popups annoy your visitors and send them off? Well, it depends on how you set it up.
For example, if your popup appears immediately after a visitor lands on your website, they will likely exit before you say Jack Robinson.
The same holds if you use boring popups that only ask for your visitors’ emails.
For best results, make your popups show when your visitors have already engaged with your website. This could be after they’ve spent, say, 5 minutes on your page.
Better yet, make them show when visitors attempt to exit your website using exit-popups.
For best results, use holiday-specific popups. For example, if you are trying to promote Halloween special deals, use a popup with a Halloween theme.
Luckily, you can easily create such popups with a single click in Adoric.
4. Enable Guest Checkout
Compelling your visitors to sign up for an account before purchasing from your website will make them want to run away.
Plus, consumers tend to have misgivings about putting their personal details on websites they are not familiar with.
This is why enabling guest checkout becomes needful. In the simplest sense, guest checkout is the practice of letting shoppers make purchases without signing up for an account on a website.
To enable guest checkout on Shopify, log in to your admin dashboard and navigate to Settings >> Checkout and account. Then uncheck the “Require customers to login before checkout”Â
5. Offer Free Shipping
Nothing delights online shoppers more than free shipping. In fact, offering free shipping to your customers is one of the fastest ways to build loyalty with them and convert them into lifelong customers.
But won’t free shipping cost you money? Yes, it will, but if done right, you can recoup whatever you spent and amass a lot of profits.
One surefire way to make your free shipping offer effective store is by making it dynamic. For example, you can offer customers free shipping when their orders get or exceed $100.
Furthermore, you must ensure customers are aware of your free shipping offer. This is where our free shipping bar comes into play.
It allows you to display free shipping offers on your website in such a way that it gets maximum attention.
6. Gamify Your Users’ Experience
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could spice up your visitors’ shopping experience by allowing them to play interactive games in which they win coupons/discounts?
Of course, it would! This is what e-commerce gamification is all about.
Gamifying your visitors’ browsing experience has numerous benefits. The most notable is that it can boost user engagement in more ways than you can imagine.
Lucky for you, there are several ways you can add gamification to your website.
One is by deploying spin-to-win popups to your website. These popups allow you to give your customers the chance to win coupons by spinning a wheel of fortune. After spinning, they would win whatever discount the wheel falls on.
It looks something like this:
Thankfully, we’ve got a lot of spin-to-win templates, and you can customize them however you want.
If you don’t want to use spin-to-win popups, you can try using our Falling Gifts popup instead. It’s also a gamified popup that lets your visitors win coupons by playing interactive games.
This time around, all they have to do is click on falling gift boxes displayed on their screens. They would win whatever gift is contained inside the box.
To prove how effective the Falling Gifts can be, we tried it out on Gade’s website, and the result was impressive.
Gade’s conversion rate and leads grew tremendously. While leads saw an uplift of 500%, conversion rate surged by 23.3%
7. Enable Multi-currency Payment
If you plan to sell to shoppers beyond your country’s borders, you must be prepared to accept payments in multiple currencies.
Wouldn’t it be better if you just allowed them to convert their preferred currency into Dollars or whatever currency you accept in your store?
Well, it’s not that simple; some shoppers prefer to pay in their native currency, primarily due to the volatile nature of the FOREX market.
So it’s in your best interest to enable multi-currency payment on your website, as doing so will allow you to win a lot of sales this holiday season.
Thankfully, Shopify makes it easy to set up multiple currency payments.
Conclusion
The holiday shopping season is a great time for e-commerce. Nevertheless, you won’t make the most out of it if you don’t prep your online store for maximum sales.
Thankfully, the tips we’ve shared here will help you drive a lot of sales this holiday season if you put them to practice.
Ready to see how Adoric can help convert your website traffic into sales? Sign up for an account right away.
