2022 Ecommerce Holiday Guide: Tips & Strategies

It's that time of year again! The holidays are just around the corner and that means ecommerce merchants need to start preparing for an onslaught of holiday shoppers. In fact, some businesses are capturing 80-90% of their revenue during this period. This year, shoppers are starting to buy earlier than ever amid supply chain complications and merchants offering up early holiday sales. 

As an ecommerce merchant, you need to make sure your website is ready for the influx of holiday shoppers. Here are five key steps you can take to prepare for this holiday season: 

Maximize conversions and boost end-of-year sales

You’ll likely be competing with other ecommerce offers and promotions during big sale periods such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and Boxing Day. With countless options, shoppers will likely go where is most convenient for them, brands they trust and most importantly, for the best prices. So what can merchants do to stand out? 

By identifying key dates for promotions and target customers with personalized promotions. User creative strategies such as cart abandonment emails and embedded shopping solutions to reach users where they are–whether it's on social media or at a mall. 

Over the holidays, you’ll likely get customers outside of your typical loyal followers. Whether you offer guest checkout or not, you should adjust your checkout to allow guest checkout – and make it obvious, clear, and accessible – for the holiday season. This will help you capture conversions from visitors who are not regular customers. The last thing you want to do is turn away potential new customers.

Prepare for peak traffic

More traffic is normally great for your business. However, unpredictable website traffic can cause performance issues, and even force your store to go offline. You can test your site loading times to ensure that every page loads efficiently and that you’re prepared for peak traffic periods. 

To avoid interruptions, work with your website hosting company to ensure your disk space and bandwidth are increased sufficiently for the upcoming holiday season. Cloud hosting services are available, and some website hosts will offer flexible bandwidth that automatically adjusts according to your site traffic. Rather than using shared hosting, you can use a dedicated server, giving you complete control. The only downside is that it will require more maintenance.

Stock up on inventory

Make sure you have sufficient stock to meet customer demands throughout the holidays. Research shows that many retailers, especially those in tech experiencing a chip shortage are expected to experience major inventory shortages this holiday season. And holiday shipping windows are getting smaller, where retailers saw a 30% slowdown for first-class mail in 2021. 

It’s just as important to make sure you don’t overstock yourself and add unnecessary expenses. Predictive analytics can aid in inventory management issues. Analyze for your historical sales data and monitor your inventory closely. Use previous sales records to predict the need for this holiday season. 

Enable fraud protection

For many ecommerce businesses, the holidays are a harrowing time because of a spike in fraud, up a whopping 178% last year. While many fraud protection services can be costly and difficult to navigate, providers like Bolt automate the necessary steps to safeguard retailers from existential threats and protect customers from unwanted risks. 

Instead of having to search for a third party fraud solution, all Bolt merchants have access to its proprietary fraud protection. For small businesses like Bagriders.com, having access to an all-in-one fraud and checkout solution gave them a piece of mind. 

Internally, one of the other most impactful outcomes for Bag Riders was the shift away from managing fraud on their own. With Bolt, small businesses can remove costs associated with hiring an outside fraud protection service. Prior to Bolt, Bag Riders suffered nearly $100,000 in losses related to fraud/chargebacks–which was a huge hit, especially for a small business. 

“This is obviously an immense improvement and not considering the ‘lost bandwidth’ and labor cost associated with having our employees performing this duty,” according to Bag Riders CEO and CTO John Hall.

Bolt’s fraud protection, in particular, feeds hundreds of behavioral signals into a supervised machine learning model to prevent fraud early and often. Doing so has allowed Bolt to approve an industry-leading 99% of orders.

Prioritize customer service

Many holiday season purchases are gifts purchased for others. During this hectic time, your shoppers will likely want more support than usual to ensure that:

• the gift is exactly as ordered
• delivered on time and to the right address
• and received in good condition. 

Give customers prompt support throughout the holidays, and have more hands on deck to handle shipping requirements.

For many ecommerce businesses, doing each of the above steps can feel like running a marathon without training. It’s a lot to ask, especially when retailers don’t have enough resources or time. That’s why retailers should consider partnering with a modern checkout solution. Providers like Bolt automate the necessary steps to help retailers improve their customer experience and convert shoppers for life. 

Take the stress out of checking out

Holiday shopping requires more logistical stress than any other time of the year. Picture a checkout experience where you don’t have to type in your personal information every time you make a purchase and you leverage an ecommerce shopping network of more than 10 million shoppers. 

Integrate Bolt One-Click Checkout into your online store in minutes just in time for the holidays, so you can convert more shoppers with a speedy checkout. Reduce form fields and save customers as much time as possible by auto-filling forms and verifying data entry. Even better, you can personalize your shoppers’ checkout experience with product recommendations based on their preferences. 
You should always be working to improve your checkout process. Sign up now for Bolt One-Click Checkout to attract more shoppers, reduce the steps customers must take to complete purchases and decrease abandoned carts.