8 Magento Store Preparation Hacks for Off-The-Chart Holiday Sales

The usual holiday sales period is between November and January. But for most store owners, the start of September is the ideal time for preparation of the holiday season in 2018. This gives them ample time to test their website for downtime, site-speed, product catalog optimization, and overall store preparation so they can get more sales and profits.

Magento Holiday Store Preparation

As most ecommerce stores are created with Magento framework, we will be sharing some of the best store Magento optimization tips to boost sales.

Optimized Hosting Stack

First thing first. Whether you are preparing for the holiday season or for daily sales, getting an optimized hosting stack should be on top of your list. Why?

People leave a website if it is slow. How do you know if a website is slow? It takes more than 3 seconds to load the website.

So, Magento store owners should get an ecommerce hosting solution that offers full page cache, and advanced performance optimization technology to increase performance before the holiday season. Cloudways is the best Magento hosting solution for ecommerce stores because it offers all these features and many more.

Add One-click checkout

Once they have a proper hosting stack, the store owners should aim for a one-click checkout.

Cart abandonment rate is a major issue during the holiday sprint. Around 69 percent of visitors abandon cart during the holiday season of 2017. And studies have suggested that a major reason people leave a filled shopping cart is that of the long checkout process. So, the best way to improve Magento store performance is by adding a single click checkout option.

Make Layout Attractive

What is that one theme that is attractive, fast, light, and offers complete ecommerce functionality to Magento store owners? Install it on your ecommerce website.

Research suggests that the overall credibility of a website depends on the type of layout it has. A website with an unprofessional layout will look shady, and in most cases, people will avoid purchase at all.

On the other hand, websites with powerful and simple layouts will get sales even if they have only a handful of products available. Because they look credible, offer an attractive design, and meet the taste of the shoppers.

Create a Blog Calendar

How to market your product to the users once you have set up your store? Set up a blog and start posting content that users will be looking for during the holiday season. We are writing this post in August. Now is the right time to create and promote your blog. Because if you start later or just before the start of the holiday season, it won’t have the impact that you desire.

Some type of blog topic ideas for Magento store owners are:

  • Must-Have PRODUCTS to buy during the holiday season
  • X Product benefits and Why You Should Get it During the Holiday Season
  • Why This Is The Right Time to Purchase PRODUCTNAME

Test & Remarket

Test multiple types of the audience with lead segmentation. You will need leads to remarket them with product ads. How do you get leads? We have written extensively on it in our Ecommerce Lead Generation blog post.

Once you have leads, remarket them with a variety of products and then note down the results. You will soon have a winning strategy. Scale this strategy for wider promotions before & during the holiday season.

Add more payment options

More payment options can lead to more sales. Why? Suppose you have PayPal as a payment gateway only. Now, some people may not prefer PayPal because of their biases. But there is a simple workaround. Get another payment gateway for those who don’t want to use PayPal.

This way these potential customers will not turn away from your store, as they will now have a second payment option available.

There is one more benefit of these payment methods. More payment options may be hard to maintain, but during the holiday sales spur, when transactions will take more time, more payment options will make the whole transaction process easy to manage.

Outsource shipping

Shipping can become one of the biggest dilemmas during the holiday seasons. Because of an outburst of orders, the logistics teams of most companies are busy in organizing and scheduling dispatches. This all is a cumbersome task and can lead to wrong orders getting sent to wrong recipients. An alternative is: Outsource the shipping.

By outsourcing your store’s shipping, you can liberate yourself from handling logistics and shopping. The third party will take a better care of the shipping, while you will be working on the actual business i.e. getting customers to your website.

Pre-Marketing & Hype

Seth Godin, the lord of unconventional marketing strategies, has put that you need a purple cow to grab attention. Whether it is a product, a service, or an ecommerce store. Creating a remarkable pre-marketing strategy takes time. So, sleep on it, give it a few days and come up with ideas that can create the most hype.

Whether you are wrong, or not, it is still better than not trying a pre-marketing campaign at all.

As a Magento store owner who wants to increase sales during the holiday season, get into the minds of people before the season starts.

Offer Unbeatable but Sensible Discounts

How do most ecommerce stores play the game? They keep discounting the products to beat the competition. But that isn’t the wisest strategy available because it drives the price down and manufacturers dilute the quality of the product to keep up with the production.

A better way to deal with this is to offer discounts that are enough to provide you with a decent commission. You can also play with ‘features’ i.e. offer products with features that others are not offering.

One question that will be in your mind now: How to find these features?

Create polls. Get an answer from the audience on your social media pages. Run paid polls to collect feedback.

Final Word

That’s it. These Magento store optimization hacks are enough to get you started with store preparation for the holiday season of 2018.
Have a tip in mind that can become a good addition to our blog? Comment it below.

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