How to Prepare Your eCommerce Business for the Holiday Season With Online Financing and More

Holiday season online shopping has blown up since the Covid-19 pandemic. It is estimated that festive season sales in 2021 will reach a record $910 billion. These figures are a testament to the importance of preparing your eCommerce business for another busy holiday period. Whether your marketing team has come with some suggestions, you are still considering how to optimize your online website, or you have not yet heard of how to improve sales during the holiday season, this article discusses ways to prepare your online retail platform for the festive rush. With online financing and other easy-to-implement strategies, you can ensure that you experience a profitable end to the calendar year. 

Leverage Sales With Online Financing

Online financing from ChargeAfter is a novel eCommerce solution that helps businesses leverage more sales. In a nutshell, online financing is an option for consumers to seek financial aid during checkout to purchase their favorite products or services. ChargeAfter provides an industry-leading online financing service that connects eCommerce platforms with a large network of trustworthy lenders. These lenders can facilitate customers’ purchases through personalized repayment plans that come with no additional interest. Integrating ChargeAfter’s online financing feature this holiday season can improve sales as it can offer your customers several benefits. Beyond zero-interest loans, customers can receive financing at the push of a button and without having to leave your store. This keeps shoppers engaged for longer, driving sales and minimizing your website’s abandoned cart rates.

Improve Your Site Speeds and Stability

Site speed is critical to eCommerce success as you want consumers to get from your landing pages to checkout as quickly as possible. Furthermore, Google’s SEO algorithms favor websites with faster page loading speeds. To ensure that you sell more during the festive season, check your site speed analytics via platforms like Google PageSpeed Insights or UberSuggest and remedy issues that affect speeds. Another tip to deal with the influx of shoppers during the holiday period is to ensure that your website is stable. This may involve migrating to a more reliable hosting platform. That said, most eCommerce platforms provide comprehensive support and you can lodge queries directly with your service provider if consumers are having trouble browsing your website. 

Prioritize Your Shipping Capabilities

Consumers shopping during the festive season want assurance that they will receive their products before Christmas Day. As such, you should ensure that your shipping facilities are available, capable, and reliable. If you market that your delivery will take up to 3 days, then you need to provide some level of guarantee that you can live up to this claim. The last thing your eCommerce brand needs is negative reviews during the holiday season as these will negatively affect your sales metrics. Some solutions are to handle shipping in-house, connect with trustworthy logistics companies, or consult a drop shipper to leverage efficient dropshipping services. 

Make Sure You Run Marketing Campaigns

Don’t let your eCommerce site succumb to the holiday marketing clutter. You need to run marketing campaigns during this season as the biggest and best eCommerce stores will be doing so. The competition will be rife, and if you want to get noticed then you need to budget for marketing during the holidays. You can run social media campaigns, PPC ads, page takeovers, and utilize a variety of other digital advertising avenues to put your brand front of mind over the holidays.

If you want to leverage the Christmas spirit and make more sales this holiday season, ensure that you integrate online financing from ChargeAfter, improve your site speeds, prioritize your shipping, and run great marketing campaigns.

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