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Aug 7, 2024 | 10 minute read
written by Seamus Roddy
Are you prepared for holiday eCommerce? Maybe feels early in the year to have it on your mind, but consider the stakes:
Taken together, these stats show that even in economic uncertainty, the holidays are a source of growing traffic and online sales. So, how can your business capture a slice of the $220 billion pie? With robust eCommerce holiday readiness.
Learn nine holiday season eCommerce prep tips your brand should take this year. You’ll also see how Elastic Path Composable Commerce products help bring these tips to life.
Why it’s important: Having a fast, high-performing commerce site is always important. But it becomes even more essential during the holiday season, when spikes of 2X, 5X, or even 10X traffic are registered by many companies. A site that is slow, buggy, or doesn’t meet accessibility requirements will repel customers – and cost you business.
How Elastic Path can help: The first step of improving your site performance is having a handle on it. That’s the purpose of our Storefront Grader™, a site performance tool purpose built for commerce storefronts. With Storefront Grader, your site is evaluated on four key metrics: performance, accessibility, best practices, and search engine optimization (SEO). Your report is detailed and actionable, with clear instruction and suggestions on improvements and how to report the findings to your organization.
Why it’s important: You’re anticipating revenue over the holiday season, but so are your competitors. It’s a competition for customers, which means running holiday marketing campaigns that deliver a fast and tangible return on ad spend (ROAS). Specifically, running commerce-enabled campaigns, in which people can buy directly from the marketing materials they engage with, helps boost ROAS.
How Elastic Path can help: We offer high-converting, no-code shoppable landing pages through Elastic Path Studio. Studio landing pages are a valuable marketing investment because they bring commerce, content, and customer data together for personalized, high-converting experiences – without relying on dev or IT support. Built into Studio landing pages is an instant-on, no-code Klevu integration for AI-enhanced product discovery, categorization, and site search – meaning you can operationalize
See our solution in action: Watch to see one of our templatized landing pages – embedded with Klevu’s AI-enhanced product discovery, categorization, and site search – be created in minutes.
Why it’s important: Acing the holiday commerce season is about understanding customer behavior and desires. And that means collecting and operationalizing data. Having strong, accurate analytics and reporting isn’t just about customer acquisition – it also helps improve inventory management, customer service, and site optimization.
How Elastic Path can help: We help with analytics, reporting, and data management across our suite of composable products and solutions. Elastic Path Product Experience Manager, our product merchandising and catalog management product, includes a commerce PIM for importing, enriching, and organizing product data fast and simply. Our Studio landing pages are all enriched with analytics, A/B testing, reporting, and more so that you have a holistic and tangible understanding of every shoppable landing page’s performance.
Why it’s important: During the holiday season, online shoppers are inundated with offers, advertisements, and marketing promotions. Sand apart from competitors by ensuring that the offers and experiences from your brand are personalized. Offer pricing, promotions, and content based on a buyer’s attributes – or, with first-party data, their past behavior.
How Elastic Path can help: You can operationalize first-party data to offer personalized commerce experiences with Elastic Path Composer’s one-click integration with Twilio Segment. The integration means you can analyze customer data and build personalized experiences that are built on past behavior. Unlike other commerce campaigns and storefronts, yours can be built on true 1:1 personalization – not personas and audiences.
See our solution in action: Watch the demo of Elastic Path’s no-code Twilio Segment integration to see how all brands – not just those with massive budgets and dedicated data teams – can activate their data to create personalized commerce experiences that drive conversions.
Why it’s important: A marker of success year-round – and especially during the holiday season – is increasing average order volume (AOV). A tried-and-true tactic for increasing AOV is running promotions, bundles, and other special offers. You can market these offers as special customer experiences when they are rolled out during the holidays – for example, bundling together a video gaming system with games as a bundle, or offering a members-only promotion in the week before Thanksgiving.
How Elastic Path can help: We have robust promotions and product bundling campabilities. Product Experience Manager offers SKU-less bundles, which helps enable AOV-boosting bundling even for highly-configurable products. And within Product Experience Manager, our new Promotions Builder capability lets merchandisers create customized promotions without development work. By using Promotions Builder, you can set conditions, apply pre-existing actions, and expand a single promotion to many users – fast and without stress.
See our solution in action: Learn the five most important elements of Promotions Builder.
Why it’s important: Flash sales might sound counterintuitive: Aren’t the holidays built-in with the urgency needed to get customers to convert and hit purchase? Not necessarily. While there are buying deadlines, there’s also extreme buying fatigue – in the sea of available products online, what makes your offer stand out? Flash sales create an exciting and time-sensitive shopping experience, and are worth experimentation.
How Elastic Path can help: Product Experience Manager allows merchandisers to set special pricing for specific products – and to extend or shorten flash sales based on the response.
Why it’s important: 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned. And during the holiday season, when shopping around online is even more prevalent, your abandonment rates could be even higher. By improving and streamlining your checkout process and commerce cart, you avoid leaving valuable revenue on the table.
How Elastic Path can help: We have a robust Cart and Checkout commerce capability. Specific features include:
Many top brands – including Charlotte Tilbury, Serena & Lily, Hole19, and Astrak Group – use Elastic Path to power high-converting commerce cart experiences.
Why it’s important: Retargeting during and after the holiday season helps re-engage visitors who showed interest but didn't complete a purchase, increasing the chances of conversion. By using targeted ads and personalized messages, you can remind these potential customers of items they viewed or added to their cart, encouraging them to return and buy. Post-holiday retargeting also maintains customer engagement, turning one-time holiday shoppers into loyal, repeat customers.
How Elastic Path can help: Across our family of composable products and solutions, you get the tools to operationalize first-party data and launch marketing and merchandising initiatives tailored to retargeting. Whether through flash sales or post-holiday marketing campaigns or other initiatives, Elastic Path is a year-round commerce solution built to deliver fast time-to-value and clear, inarguable return-on-investment.
With Elastic Path, you get what you need to launch successful holiday merchandising and marketing. Evaluate our list of eCommerce holiday readiness prep tips, and think about where you’d like to improve. Then, talk with an Elastic Path expert today about how our commerce solutions can help you drive conversion and revenue fast throughout the holiday season.
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