The holiday season is just around the corner, bringing with it the shopping frenzy of Christmas and the New Year. According to Deloitte’s annual holiday retail forecast, the total sales are projected to increase from 4.5 percent to 5 percent in 2019, exceeding $1.1 trillion during the November to January time frame. In the online space, E-commerce sales will reach between $144 billion to $149 billion this holiday season, growing by 14% to 18%. With E-commerce businesses growing at an unprecedented rate globally, most businesses (both established and start-ups) are looking out for innovative ways to boost their revenue via this online medium.With more shoppers spending their money online, E-commerce businesses now rely on outsourced solutions to offer better quality services and improve customer satisfaction.
Online sales are booming – especially during the magical holiday shopping season running from late November to early January. All E-commerce businesses are under constant pressure to plan new ways to innovate and transform, but right from incorporating streaming into your ecommerce platform, tailored FAQs, smart merchandising, product information management or PIM – there are a lot many features that need to be considered. In fact, many businesses are utilizing these features as a competitive weapon, while simultaneously striving to improve profit margins and streamlining order turnaround to meet growing customer expectations.
Here are some important tips for e-commerce businesses to optimize order fulfillment and maximize profits during the peak holiday season –
- Embrace the idea of automation – The peak holiday season can witness a massive increase in order volumes. Demands become more complex, tasks mount and tedious work becomes even more tedious. These can cripple an unprepared warehouse or shipping department and leave a bad impression in the minds of customers waiting too long for their orders. The individual customer experiences can either make or break a brand. By automating warehouse operations with a cloud-based, e-commerce-enabled warehouse management system (WMS), businesses can increase the speed and accuracy of order fulfillment when it counts the most. E-commerce software can turn processes like inventory management, online store creation, purchase and payment facilitations (within your business) into automated systems. These intelligent systems can tackle the above tasks and offer the best, time-efficient alternative which is tailored to the needs of your organization.
- Accelerate pick-pack-ship workflows – In an e-commerce platform, shipping can rack up heaps of cost and time, especially during the peak season, when you are dealing with high volume of deliveries and a wider range of goods. By automating the pick-pack process, and using barcode scanners in the warehouse, retailers can minimize costs and improve accuracy by eliminating mis-picks. An automated, cloud-based shipping platform helps retailers ship orders quickly by integrating with online market places, back-end financial systems and parcel shipping providers.
- Optimize delivery – Delivery can be a costly proposition for companies as they face the challenge of keeping pace with consumers’ last mile expectations or risk forfeiting sales. Walmart recently launched its own one-day delivery program for orders of $35 or more without a membership fee, Target announced a flat-fee – same-day shipping option and Macy’s is piloting free same-day delivery (for orders of $75 or more) in 30 markets across the US.
Generally, the customer’s experience of shipping and delivery shapes their view about a brand. However, during the peak season, due to surging order volumes, last-minute shopping, and winter-weather delivery challenges, many retailers struggle to provide cost-effective delivery. To meet rising customer expectations, leading retailers are transforming their shipping and delivery strategies from cost-centric to consumer-centric. Try to give your customers diverse options. Popular options include second-day shipping, free to pick-up in store, and free shipping on orders above a certain cart value. Avoid creating complexity, keep the checkout process simple, but definitely give customers choices. By automating scheduling and optimizing routing, businesses can drive up on-time delivery performance and drive down transportation costs.
- Build a good customer relationship management (CRM) system – A good CRM system can work wonders and increase sales productivity up to 34 percent. A CRM system creates a single source of data entry for end-to-end business processes. By integrating a sales automation system within the CRM model, it can help use process-driven cloud software to enable complete control of your business. By utilizing the CRM system, it is possible to automatically tailor advertisements to the right person and save time in traditional marketing. In addition, it also helps keep track of your competitors in one single place.
- Promote on social media –The holiday season is the perfect time for brands to push themselves on social media platforms. Right from working with influencers to showcasing your festive adverts and keeping in touch with customer enquiries, social media can help showcase even your smallest businesses. You can schedule posts months, weeks and days in advance. Incorporating tactics like holding contests and providing special discount codes can boost sales from your social media followers. Take advantage of analytics features to see which posts do well and not so well, so that you can improve your offering and make a well-informed decision on the content timing and even the platform you are using.
- Review your checkout process – Streamline your checkout process to optimize conversions. According to recent statistics, the average cart abandonment rate is at 69.5 percent – meaning over two-thirds of prospects who initiate the checkout procedure drop off before completing the purchase. Some common strategies which help improve the process include – implement a one-page checkout, never ask for the same information twice and remove unnecessary distractions for the customer (promo code field, site wide banner, header and footer).
- Highlight special season/ holiday offers – If you are offering special deals (like – free shipping, BOGOs, discount codes) for the holiday season, do not make your customers hunt around your site to figure that out. Test implement a sitewide banner that advertises the latest offers. On the other hand, if you are going to use email, social media, ads, influencers – never direct traffic to a webpage that makes visitors work to figure out what to do next. Instead, guide them step by step on the path to the sale.
- Reward your subscribers – Extending special offers to subscribers who open offer-related emails may show how much you appreciate them. When prospects subscribe to your mailing list, send them a special discount code for placing their first order. Give subscribers advance access to sales events, so they can get their orders placed ahead of the crowd. Offering these special rewards can help in growing your subscriber base well in advance before the holiday season.
- Build momentum in advance of the holiday – Develop a clear content strategy that will build momentum leading up to the most important holidays (like – Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, New year day and more). Consider using a countdown to build anticipation leading up to a sale, or increasing your social ad spends during peak shopping times. Create your content calendar months in advance, so that you know exactly what content will be posting, time of posting and how it will match your overall content marketing strategy.
- Product reviews – Product reviews help improve customer reach and ecommerce revenue. It is estimated that nine out of ten customers go through reviews before buying a product, as this helps them make a wise decision about the products or services you provide. Good quality reviews from other customers will help your ecommerce store stand out in Google’s local SEO rankings.
An e-commerce site can be optimized by making products easy to find.With the holiday season nearing and retailers facing a flood of holiday orders, e-commerce retailers must strengthen their order fulfillment processes and effectively fulfill the rising customer expectations. The above-mentioned tips can help e-commerce businesses optimize order fulfillments, improve AOV and maximize revenue during the peak holiday season. The starting point of any ecommerce business is data entry and outsourcing data entry is the best way to ensure that all your product details like titles, prices, images, and descriptions are manually checked and reviewed before they are uploaded to your website. This will help your business stay ahead of the competition and attract sales year-round.
