The holiday season calls for not only celebrations but shopping for our near and dear ones. Whether it is offline stores or online stores, we often see a crowd of people browsing aisles or navigation windows for the perfect Christmas present through their smartphones and desktops.
Clearly, the holiday season makes up quite an amount of sales for businesses of all kinds. But, what does it take for businesses to ensure an upsurge in sales?
Well, this blog is about all that – ways to increase sales for your Magento stores during the holiday season. Take these tips as you hire Magento web developer for your online store.
Offline Vs Online Holiday Shopping
Before we present any sales tips for your Magento stores, let’s help you understand why you need to spruce up your online store.
Check out the table mentioned below to see what’s the year-wise preference of customers on online and offline holiday shopping – as per a Statista report.
| Year | Online | Offline |
| 2015 | 42% | 58% |
| 2016 | 44% | 56% |
| 2017 | 50% | 50% |
| 2018 | 50% | 50% |
| 2019 | 54% | 46% |
| 2020 | 61% | 39% |
| 2021 | 57% | 43% |
| 2022 | 57% | 43% |
As evident, the year on year statistics show the growth in online sales around the holiday season. Today’s shoppers prefer shopping online and they have plenty of options to choose from.
So, if you want to attract the audience’s attention, retain them, and convert them, you have to optimize your online store for the winter holiday season.
Here, let’s check the ways your Magento store can be optimized!
Ways to Optimize Your Magento Christmas Store for Better Sales
● Visual optimization
The first thing you have to do is change your store’s user interface or visual appearance for Christmas. Yes! It’s time for a makeover and there are plenty of ways to do so. Here, look at some of the ways a Magento programmer can help you glam up the aesthetics of your eCommerce store.
- Add holiday season effects
With the help of this Magento extension, you will be able to add holiday effects to your eCommerce store. Whether you add a snowfall effect, a Santa walking with a gift bag, Christmas trees, or a light decoration, it is up to you.
Also Read: Does your E-commerce business really need a mobile app?
Make sure to add the effects of your choice and decorate your online store around the holidays. However, the plugin will cost you about $9 with assured installation support. So, you can easily integrate this plugin into your Magento store and make sure to add holiday season effects on top of the already-built eCommerce store.
What’s great about this plugin is that it is compatible with most of the Magento themes and wouldn’t affect any of your default existing features. So, it is like an add-on you can use for your Christmas store.
- Change into a Christmas-ready Magento theme
There are many theme stores from where you can download themes for Christmas and implement them in your store. While changing your Magento store’s theme can transform the entire look and feel of your store, it takes time and can be tedious.
And if you try to implement the theme on top of your existing site, some features may not perform as they should. In some cases, you may have to hire Magento developer and create a custom Magento theme for your eCommerce store.
This is a lot of hassle for the holiday season and you may end up losing more time and money in the process. So, this process isn’t recommended unless it is absolutely necessary to do so.
- Use festive season extension
This Magento module comes free of cost and can be used to spruce up your store for the upcoming holiday season. You can change the font, play around with the festive colors, decorations, headers, and footers of your choice from the admin interface only.
● Performance optimization
Most people are at leisure during the holiday season and tend to make more purchases. Thus, most online stores expect a rise in traffic.
And if you want to be prepared for an upsurge like this, you have to ensure your Magento store can handle the huge amount of incoming traffic. If needed, you will need to scale your store.
In addition, you should also see that your Magento store loads faster. You might as well upgrade your hosting plan or use a CDN (content delivery network) to assure your Magento Christmas store loads quickly.
It will elevate your store’s user experience and give it the much-needed performance boost this festive season.
● Marketing improvements
Now that the look and feel of your Magento store are dealt with, it is time to get the word out of your new Christmas makeover. Not just that, what’s new this Christmas season and what offers can benefit customers.
There’s only one way to get plenty of customers to your store, i.e., by promoting your store through the right marketing tactics and suitable marketing channels. Here, look at some of the ways you can improve your marketing game.
- Focus more on bringing organic traffic to your store with the help of SEO (search engine optimization). If your store has a blogging section, it is much easier to perform better organically on SERPs.
- Today, almost everybody is on social networking sites and there’s no better place to market your store than social media. With the help of social media posts, carousels, reels, GIFs, and videos, you can inform and persuade customers to shop from your store. You can design the media in a more Christmas-worthy style to attract the attention of the audience.
- Your marketing strategy can include personalized email messages for existing customers. It is a good method to bring back loyal customers, inform them of special offers, and convert audiences who have abandoned products in the cart.
● Customer services
We know it’s holiday season, but if you snooze you lose! The reason is, the more customers visit your online store, the more queries and concerns you will have to deal with. Resolving the issues and answering their questions promptly will make sure they don’t sway away to your competitors.
So, make sure you are available to attend to the customer inquiries. For that, you may create a separate self-help portal with all the frequently asked questions and discussions between customers.
Or, use a Magento plugin to automate customer queries. It will decrease the number of requests you get each day and each of your customers will be attended to in time.
● Inventory management
It is the festive season and it won’t be surprising if you get out of stock early. So, make sure to analyze the year-on-year trends and the changing preferences of shoppers to predict which products will do best this year.
This should help you restock items and you can manage your inventory accordingly. It is best to use inventory management plugins and track your in-stock items, set a reminder before products have to be replenished, and so on.
You can also hire Magento 2 experts and custom-build your inventory management features based on your unique needs.
● Mobile support
Today’s shoppers use different digital devices for accessing the web. Amongst all, mobile and tablets have become quite popular over the last decade. So, if you want to target all the right audiences and increase your sales sufficiently, optimizing your Magento store for mobile devices is important, if not done already.
Apart from building a mobile-responsive store, you also need to build mobile-first features such as push notifications, geolocations, etc. This should help you convert a few more customers this Christmas and beyond.
● Payment, shipping, and fulfillment
You might have your checkout, fulfillment, and payment processes in order, but the holiday season demands additional effort. You have to ensure all the information about products, discounts, and shipping is provided on a single page only.
If you haven’t already adopted a single-page checkout, you should try to include that in your Magento store. You can hire Magento 2 developer for this purpose.
Besides this, you should also take care of your shipping operations and ensure the ordered products are delivered to the respective audience in time.
● Offer discounts and promotions
Since Christmas is the time when you select, purchase, and even wait for gifts, adding offers and discounts can be a great way to promote your Magento store. It is an interesting way of earning new customers and retaining loyal customers.
All you have to do is inform your customers of the discount and offers through the Magento website, through social media, email marketing, or press releases. You can also add options for gift cards, arrange referral campaigns, or a loyal customer rewards program to keep the audience interested in your store.
These are some of the effective ways to give your Magento store the much-needed makeover this winter season. It can attract audiences to your store and they will be able to resonate with the festive decor, offers, and improvements you have made.
Also Read: Christmas Message for Students in English
In the end, your sales are sure to rise because you have done it right!
Summary
Your Magento Christmas store needs to be optimized for the winter season, but you have no idea how to do that. Well, you have come to the right place as this article talks about all things you have to optimize to get it right and increase your sales sufficiently.
Author Bio:
Maulik Shah is the CEO of BiztechCS, a development company. He often takes the front seat in the company’s development projects, because he enjoys solving problems through technology. When it comes to writing for any blog, his contribution is priceless. Maulik ensures that his interaction with development is frequent enough, and his industry knowledge is ever-evolving so that he can share it. Despite his packed days, Maulik’s door is always open and he is generous with sharing this knowledge and experience.
