Is your website ready for Christmas? Ecommerce Services & Web Design

Well, it’s that time of year again. Depending on what industry you’re in and what products you offer, Christmas is either your busiest or most quiet time of the year.

For those of you in the retail sector, especially if you have an ecommerce presence, the build up to Christmas is the peak time to reach online sales potential. From early November, almost every ecommerce website will start rolling out Black Friday deals, sales, discounts and special offers. All planned weeks/months in advance with activity being implemented now.

Well it’s not too late to get your website ready for Christmas! Inside this article, our web design agency will provide ecommerce and web design Christmas tips on how you can get your website ready for Christmas. You could even be ahead of your competition

Reduce Abandon Shopping Cart Rates

An abandoned online shopping basket is worth on average £29.27 every month.

According to research conducted by Barclaycard, UK retailers are losing out on more than £18bn in potential sales every year. With December and November achieving peak monthly shopping car abandonments, UK shoppers have inherited a reputation of adding Christmas present or Black Friday sale items to online shopping baskets but abandoning before making a purchase. The most common abandoned items online include knitwear, leather goods, lingerie and headphones.

What tactics can you implement?
Once a user abandons their shopping cart, you can look to target these users as part of a remarketing strategy. Some popular tactics retailers have implemented are sending automated email reminders and settings a shopping basket ‘expiry period’.

As a web design agency based in Cheshire, we have worked with several businesses from a variety of different industry sectors. By offering ecommerce services, we can eliminate some of the most popular reasons why users will abandon your website such as creating a quick and easy check-out process or introducing guest logging.

Okay, while sometimes you just can’t compete with competitors’ prices or shipping, by implementing any of these strategies, you remove excuses for visitors to leave your website this Christmas.

Introduce a Christmas landing page

Shoppers spent £1.9bn online in December 2018 with UK retailers – equivalent to a fifth of all retail spending

A landing page is a great way to draw your customer’s attention to a range of festival products or a special discount offer.

By creating a festive design, many retailers will look to implement the colour red onto any Christmas landing page. Not only is the web design Christmas and the colour red highly associated with each other, marketing experts firmly believe the colour red is the most intense of colours to provoke the strongest emotions which are largely associated with sale items. You can read more about colour psychology here.

Remember to make Christmas shopping easy! Put yourself in your customers shoes and check to make sure your landing page isn’t overloaded with information or has any confusing navigation. Make your landing page as simple and as clear as possible.

It doesn’t matter if you have one or five call-to-actions, make sure the user instantly knows what your landing page is offering by highlighting the discounts they are saving, or if they sign-up how much they will save from your website. By keeping things simple and clear, you will reduce your bounce rate significantly.

Create a crystal Call-To-Action

UK consumers will spend £106.46 billion online in 2019. This will make up 22.3% of all retail spend this Christmas

Getting prospective customers to do what you want is like herding sheep. All year round, users will abandon shopping carts before checking out, not sign up to your newsletter and probably won’t read your blog. However, the Christmas period allows you to have a little more fun with your website, and your call to action.

If you use promotional banners on your website, look to include a Christmas banner where you can promote Christmas offers/products and tell your visitors what you want them to do. You can even implement these seasonal banners onto your various social media platforms.

Instead of the standard ‘Click Here’ or ‘Sign-Up’ call-to-action, look to mix things up by introducing ‘Order before Christmas’ or ‘Add to your Christmas List’ to really enforce your seasonal call-to-action. Website navigation can also lead to users abandoning your website. Look to introduce ‘Quick Links’ where a user can easily find and access any Christmas offers.