One of the best ways to ensure your business website capitalizes on holiday sales is to take extra care to prep your website before the holiday season is upon you. Not sure what a holiday website prep entails? Simple, just follow these five easy steps.

Step #1 – Holiday Search Engine Optimization
 
Assuming your search engine optimization is effective and running smoothly, website holiday preparation involves creating a separate search engine optimization strategy for the holidays. Spend some time researching the keywords and keyword phrases your customers might use during the holiday season to find your information. Optimize your site and new holiday content for these holiday keywords and keyword phrases. Add the required HTML coding and create a strategy to build incoming links for this seasonal strategy.

Step #2 – Make your website more user friendly

Broken links, graphics that take a day and a half to upload, and difficult navigation are all ways to lose a potential holiday customer. Make your website experience as positive as possible for your visitors. Give them every reason to want to stay on your site. Give them every reason to recommend your website and to come back often. This includes making your site searchable, enhancing navigation, adding holiday graphics and products or services, and offering a wealth of valuable content.

Step #3 – Is your server up to speed? 

Are your website, software, and server, prepared for a rush of traffic and transactions?  Find out how much traffic your website and supporting software can support and make sure it’s more than enough to cover you during those peak buying times. Additionally, take some time to back up your site just in case it crashes. You’ll be glad you did.

Step #4 – Protect your customers

In addition to making sure your policies, procedures and privacy statements are easy to find and up to date, make sure your customers’ transactions are secure and protected. Update your SSL and only participate with vendors who do the same. Identity theft is scary and customers will be more likely to purchase from you if they know they’re protected.

Step #5 – Is your shopping cart functioning optimally?

Spend some time running through test transactions so you see what your customers see. How can you improve the user experience and make shopping on your site, and paying for products or services, as easy and enjoyable as possible?  One of the most common causes of lost sales are abandoned shopping carts. If you need to get some new shopping cart software or tweak the process, do it now before the holidays hit.

The holidays are an optimal time to boost annual sales and to capitalize on an increase in website traffic. Making sure your website is ready for the influx of visitors and sales is the best first step you can take. Come December, you’ll be glad you took the time to perfect your customer experience and website now.

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While it may feel too early to start preparing your eBay store for the Christmas Holiday, you can be sure that when it comes to holiday shopping, it’s never too early to start preparing. Rest assured, there are people already doing their holiday shopping and as they say on the playground, you snooze you lose. So let’s win!

Here’s how to increase your eBay sales this Christmas:

#1  Start your holiday sales and campaigns early and end them late. Many eBay experts recommend starting your sales and campaigns as early as mid October and end around mid January.

#2  Create special promotions for the holidays. These include “Buy it Now” options, gift-wrapping services, buy one get one free type promotions and so on. The competition is stiff during the holidays and any value you can add to your store, items and promotions may give you that extra edge.

#3  Make sure you have a well-stocked inventory. That includes shipping supplies and a foolproof system to make sure orders get out and arrive on time. There’s nothing worse than ordering a gift from a store and then having it arrive a day late. Certainly, it’s not good for feedback ratings!

#4  Stock up on and promote what’s popular. If you have a particularly hot item or there’s an item that is hot right now and is appropriate for your store then consider stocking up on it or at least securing suppliers. Note:  you can check with eBay pulse to see what’s hot at any given point in time.

#5  Give your store a holiday theme. Holiday graphics and fonts give your store a festive feel. Of course you can go overboard with it so be careful. Design your store for the season and your target audience. If they love over the top holiday cheer then go for it.

#6  Improve or optimize your payment options. Online if a customer cannot pay how they want to pay, and the payment process isn’t quick and easy, they’re just as likely to go somewhere else. That’s the last thing you want. Open up your payment policies and make sure payments are as easy and straightforward as possible for better holiday sales.

#7  Update your store with a clear and easy to understand policies and procedures. Let customers know if you accept returns. What are your shipping policies? Try to answer any and all potential questions right up front so you don’t lose a customer who isn’t patient or interested enough to send you a question.

#8  Take advantage of marketing tools like newsletters, coupons and advertisements to drive traffic to your eBay store during the holidays. Create promotions just for the holidays and then promote them via social networking, article marketing and your other chosen marketing tools and strategies.

#9  Create goals for the holiday season. Goals are great motivators and they can really inspire us to push ourselves. Sales goals are particularly fun however don’t stop with a goal. Create strategies to achieve them. Lastly, don’t forget to establish a system to measure whether you’ve achieved your goals. For example, if you want to increase visitors to your storefront and item bids, how are you going to measure that?  Keep track of what works so you can repeat your successes next year.

While Christmas is still several months away, planning and preparing ahead of time will put you ahead of the competition and ensure that your holiday sales are as profitable and stress free as possible.

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