4 Tips On Preparing Your Ecommerce Store For the Holidays

While many companies prepare for what may be their busiest time of year, a lot goes into preparing promotions and deciding which things to offer. Especially this year, with the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic, it’s critical to appeal to and attract buyers through your company’s website.

Falling behind on preparations with the Christmas rush right around the corner can lose your business a huge chunk of the market opportunities. Continue reading to learn how to avoid this and breach the new year with brimming sales.

1. Make the Move From Shared Hosting to VPS or Dedicated Hosting

If your e-commerce website is still housed on typical shared hosting, it’s high time to make a move to VPS hosting or even dedicated hosting. Your website may require more disk space, RAM, bandwidth, or other resources to perform well with the incoming traffic spikes.

Traditional shared hosting places your website on an underpowered, oversold server with hundreds of other customers, all of whom share the same server resources. Furthermore, if other websites on the shared server expend loads of resources simultaneously, your website will inevitably slow down.

A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is a server that divides itself into multiple virtual servers with an exclusive allocation of resources and operating systems. You also don’t have to worry about other individuals stealing your resources because each client is assigned a set number of resources based on your hosting package. However, there is still a danger that your website will slow down or shut down at busy periods because a VPS is still a single physical server with limited overall resources.

Dedicated hosting is the most appropriate for websites with significant traffic volumes and cannot afford to share resources with others. Each website will have its own physical server with all of the server’s resources allocated to it. Although this is the most costly of the three plans, it offers the most stability and speed.

2. Emphasize Your Special Holiday Promotions

Free delivery, buy one get one free deal, coupons, and other promotions should be a breeze to find. If you’re having special holiday specials, don’t make your clients look all over your website to find them. Experiment with installing a sitewide banner that promotes your most recent offerings. If you’re going to utilize email, social media, marketing, influencers, or any other channel to spread the word, don’t send them to a page that makes them work to find out what to do next. Direct them clearly on the route to the sale.

3. Streamline Customer Support

The main selling point of online shopping is the ability to order things from the comfort of your own home and have them delivered to your door. However, issues like shipment delays, incorrect purchases, and missed payments have the potential to spoil the entire experience. Streamlining customer service relieves your stress, especially during the Christmas season. Furthermore, you should reconsider your logistics provider if you’ve encountered shipment problems with them in the past. Any past problems with their systems are likely to aggravate the holiday volume spike.

4. Prioritize Site Speed

Many online shops place a premium on the appearance of their website, such as how appealing the page is, how large the visuals are, how simple it is to access the buy buttons, and so on. However, the issue is those vast pixels and interactive components drastically slow down your site.

Although a well-designed homepage is crucial, businesses should also focus on finding online solutions and hosts that provide the bandwidth and speed required to manage increased holiday traffic.

Conclusion

This year promises a significant increase in online sales, but you’ll have to do the heavy lifting first before you can get your eCommerce business on top of the 2021 holidays. Get to it!

IO Zoom seeks to provide customers with a secure VPS with the best hosting, affordable prices, fast servers, reliable uptime, and exceptional 24/7 customer services. You can have peace of mind, knowing that you are not missing any opportunities because of website downtime. Get in touch with us today to learn how else we can help you!