E-Commerce for All

Many seasoned shop owners are only too aware of the peaks and plummets in their sales volume with seasonal factors. To succeed you have to effectively make profitable use of peak sales seasons and improve off peak sales times. Today we will cover some great tips, plans and ideas for improving both peak and non-peak sales periods.

Let us concentrate on your peak sales season(s) first. You will find below that this is not only extremely important, but requires a great deal of preparation and planning as well.

1. Generally speaking, web traffic is highest will be winter months per region. The chart below indicates the amount of traffic percentage regionally for March, 2008. So the first thing you must do is determine where your traffic comes from.

   

2. Planning is everything! New products, good supply veins, navigation, conversion improvements, marketing, design and indeed, optimization also.
3. Re-designing your store is usually a very good move, as technology changes and better platforms and functions arise constantly. However, this should be TOTALLY completed 3 months before the arrival of your peak sales period… So you have ample time to test and complete usability studies.
4. Send out a marketing newsletter to previous customers, sorted by the shoppers during your peak season (if you can). Invite them back, offer them a special discount or sale item. Do this about 30 days before you begin to pick up in traffic and sales.
5. Get new products, no one can grow their rank and sales effectively without the addition of new content… Your content is products. Keep the new products relevant to your store, if you get too far away from your main product line it will only dilute your content. The best opportunities are usually items that compliment your existing inventory, like accessories and replacement parts.
6. Give your page titles and content a SEO freshen up. Are your page titles targeted and highly relevant? Do your pages have enough content to rank effectively with?
7. Test your PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns and tweak them well before you want them to perform in the peak season.
8. Answer the phone! Obviously, you should have a customer service number on your website… Staff it well for your upcoming peak sales. If you haven’t already, get a toll free number and post the hours you will answer customer service calls with the timezone.
9. Test your site and optimize your checkout, you only get one chance to make a first impression.
10. Pull your annual stats for the sales period and plan out your rate of sales increase. You see ideally, your sales are improving… So determine your rate of improvement and plot is against last years sales to determine about how busy you will be. Add 5 or 10% for good measure.
11. Call your suppliers and reps, let them know you expect a large increase in your sales and when. Sometimes you can even negotiate a better price with larger expected sales for a certain period. Make very certain they will be able to supply your site appropriately in the upcoming sales boost.
12. Offer free shipping, gift wrapping and other amenities to bring shoppers to your site… And hopefully share it with others also!
13. Deliver, deliver, deliver…