The two months leading up to Christmas is a busy time for our eCommerce team. We call it eCommerce Season.
The shift of consumers turning to the world wide web to buy gifts for their friends and loved ones has seen our working patterns over this ‘usually quieter’ period change significantly. It’s a seismic shift that has experienced phenomenal growth over the last few years.
According to the Guardian newspaper, UK consumers spend an average £1,083 per year each on online shopping. As per information geeks at Experian, Christmas 2012 showed some interesting statistics for the online retail industry. In the UK, Internet users made 2.8 billion visits to retail websites and spent over 372 million hours shopping, with boxing day seeing 113 million visits, setting a new British retail record! With the convenience of shopping online coupled with the ease of accessing the internet through a myriad of portable devices, it’s will come as no surprise that we are in the office until late in the months before and after Christmas.
Are you ready for Christmas?
In fact, one of the first questions we ask our new customers is, ‘are you ready for Christmas?’
When we say – “Is your business ready?”, we don’t mean “Is your server capable of handling the extra traffic?”. We mean are you ready to harness the potential of that extra traffic and tackle the dreaded problem of Basket (or ‘Cart’ if you’re American) Abandonment and improving user conversions? It’s an ideal opportunity for every online store owner to understand the bottlenecks and maximise the impact of the visitor traffic.
Mobile Phone and Tablet Ready?
With an increasing number of customers now browsing the internet using a smartphone or a tablet, your website needs to work efficiently across all these devices. Responsive design is no longer a just a cool feature. Optimal viewing experience across all devices is vital for online success. One of our eCommerce customers receive more hits from iPhones than any other device. So far this year, it averaged just over 56% of all traffic. A mobile website isn’t enough now because viewers can browse your website across different devices and responsive design ensures that there is a continuity across all of them.
Retargeting
Are you ready to deal with the first time visitors that are “just browsing”. Retargeting has helped many small eCommerce store owners by showing those visitors who didn’t take any action on a site. Using pay per click banners or adverts elsewhere online can persuade them to go back to the site again. The technology is so advanced that Amazon (the eCommerce giant) goes one step further and send the customer emails if they still have an item left in their basket.
Want to know more? – Get in touch
WebFX
Building 1, Chalfont Park, Gerrards Cross
Buckinghamshire, SL9 0BG
Visit us
Get directions
Email
[email protected]
Phone
+44 (0) 1753 910 390