3 Things eCommerce Sites Need to Do When Preparing for the Holidays

It's that time again! The holidays are (always) rapidly approaching and we have all started projects to make sure our eCommerce sites are ready to scale and will provide the best conversion rates. Hopefully you are making plans to begin these projects this summer so you can be ready by October, when your site goes into “lock-down” mode. 

According to Statista, Holiday season eCommerce sales are expected to increase 14.4 percent from last year, totaling 82.4 billion dollars. It goes without saying that it is vital that your site is prepared for the Holiday onslaught.

Let’s quickly look at some data from the Holidays last year:

• Cyber Monday: $2 billion in retail purchases via desktop. (up 17% from 2013)
• Green Monday (Dec 8) and Black Friday together accounted for over $3 billion in ecommerce desktop sales.
• Mobile sales accounted for 22.6 percent of all online sales.
• Average Order Value (Desktop): $125.12
• Average Order Value (Mobile): $104.82

This data shows that your eCommerce site must be high performance ready for more and more high traffic days this year. It is important to recognize the importance of mobile shoppers; after all, mobile sales increased by 27.3 percent from 2013. You can bet that everyone else is getting mobile-ready if they haven’t done so already in the wake of Mobilegeddon.

3 Preparations eCommerce Sites Need to Do before the Holidays

Load Testing

First, you need to make sure your site is ready to handle a set number of users. Chances are, more traffic will be flooding your site more than ever before this Holiday season. Secondly, you should use load testing to find out how much your site slows down at peak traffic.  Yes, slower site speeds will impact your conversion rates.

A/B Testing

When you're comparing site A to site B, you need to be thinking about your site performance's impact on conversions. If one site can drive up conversions by giving end users a faster experience, consider investing in that site design because it has the highest revenue opportunity.

General Optimizations

Don't spend time and money speeding up the wrong pages. General optimizations for speed are great, but every page of your site will not have the same impact on overall site conversions. The key is to figure out which pages are causing people to not buy due to page speeds. Page speeds can also cause people to buy less. Our data across many sites has revealed that site owners are often working on speeding up pages that are not impacting the decision to buy or the average order value.

The logical way to approach any performance or experience project is to focus on what will drive up revenue first. Don’t just spend your time focused on pages you think may make a difference; focus on pages you know will make a difference.

Blue Triangle provides the business case for investing in website optimizations. Ready to learn more?