Is Your Online Business Prepared For The Holiday Rush?
The festive season is upon us, which is great news for ecommerce businesses. As everybody gets ready for Christmas and starts buying all of their presents, online businesses will see a big increase in sales. This year is likely to be even busier because fewer people are visiting the high street due to coronavirus restrictions.
If you run an online store, it’s so important that you are ready for this seasonal rush. You will get a lot of new customers and if you offer them a good service, they will become repeat customers and you will see long term growth. But if you aren’t prepared to meet demand, you will struggle with late deliveries and lack of stock, so those customers aren’t likely to come back again. If you don’t feel prepared for the holiday rush, here are a few important steps you should take.
Manage Customer Expectations
Even though you need to adapt the business to deal with the holiday rush, there are still limitations. You must manage customer expectations so people are not disappointed. Letting people know that delivery times may be a little slower and you only have limited stocks of certain items will encourage people to put their orders in earlier and those that miss out won’t be as disappointed because their expectations are managed. It’s important that you build an email list so you can easily convey this message to your customers. Having an email list also gives you other revenue generating opportunities, so if you don’t have one already, start building one right away.
Prepare For Increased Delivery Demand
Late deliveries are the easiest way to make sure that a customer never buys from your site again, so you need to prepare for the increased demand and make sure that your products get out on time. If you manage your own deliveries, get in touch with a van hire company for more vehicles and hire some temporary drivers. Hiring vans and using temporary staff will get you through the busy period and it’s much cheaper than buying new vehicles.
If your deliveries are managed by a courier, contact them and give them some idea of how many orders you expect over the holiday period. They will need to make sure that they are prepared as well, so give them some warning.
Upgrade Your Website Hosting
Your website traffic is likely to skyrocket during the holiday season, and that can cause problems. If your site isn’t able to cope with that much traffic, it will load incredibly slowly, or even crash, which means you lose a lot of potential customers. You can avoid this if you upgrade your website hosting to cope with more traffic. It’s also worth looking at the design and cutting back on excess video and animations that cause problems with loading as well. Unless your website is running smoothly, you will lose out on a lot of potential sales this holiday season.
Take these steps to prepare your online business for the holiday rush and you will see a lot of long term benefits.
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Running a successful business can feel like walking on a tightrope while juggling multiple swords at once, both high adrenaline and exhausting. Success requires knowing when and what aspects of business require precision planning versus those you can leave to chance, whether that be startup superstardom or veteran CEOship.