Tom's Blog
Is Your Website Ready For Christmas?
8/6/2007 - tom@mywebdept.com
Christmas is Right Around the Corner
Some people buy their Christmas presents well before the traditional shopping season; I'm just not one of them. So why am I telling you that Christmas is right around the corner? Because for retailers it is. As you read this, the traditional brick and mortar retailers are communicating their merchandise forecasts to vendors, finalizing their holiday advertising, and determining their staffing needs.
The reason retailers are making their holiday plans now makes good sense really, and it is a good example to follow. First, their vendors need to ramp up production levels. They already know that part, but they don't know how much they need to ramp them up. As for their advertising, well, it takes time for graphic designers to create the advertising and have those designs approved, not to mention the time involved in securing advertising space.
Now all of those efforts are for naught if the retailer does not have the proper staffing levels to handle the increased business. Why advertise your products if you're just going to drive them to your competition because of poor service?
Christmas is right around the corner for the brick and mortar retailers, just as it is for the internet retailer.
What to Expect this Holiday Season
What does the 2007 Christmas shopping season have in store for the internet retailer? According to comScore, first quarter internet sales in 2007 grew by 17%, second quarter internet sales grew by 23%, and the sky is the limit for Christmas as fourth quarter internet sales have traditionally seen the highest percentage of growth in past years. What is the comScore estimate for total 2007 internet retail sales in the US alone?
"Even factoring in the moderate growth rates from Q1, we're currently on pace to break $200 billion in e-commerce spending in 2007," according to Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. "However, in the past we've seen growth rates accelerate as the year progresses, culminating with the online holiday shopping season, so $200 billion may actually turn out to be a conservative estimate."
How to Prepare for the Increase
You may be saying to yourself, "Great! I can use that extra business." I'm sure you can, but you still need to be ready for it. You should prepare in a similar fashion to a brick and mortar store. Here are the top ten things you need to be doing right now:
- Give some rough estimates to your vendors and get their commitment that they can support your sales without a drop off in customer service.
- Finalize your marketing strategy (budgets for PPC, SEO work, etc.)
- Contact your web designer and have them begin work on some specific product advertising for your home page.
- Analyze your site stats currently and extrapolate out to estimate bandwidth requirements for your site and ensure your web host can handle the additional bandwidth.
- Determine your service level for the holiday season and put it on the site (our products typically ship within 2 business days for example).
- Do you need additional staff to handle the increased orders while maintaining your service level?
- Do a full test of every static page and every application on your site.
- Test the order process and product descriptions for your most popular products.
- Clean up any and all errors on your site.
- Get suggestions from anybody and everybody.
You need to take some time to prepare your business now, or you won't reap the rewards later.
Hot E-Commerce Features for 2007 Holiday Season
As you know, the web is always evolving. Here are a couple of new ideas that you might see show up this shopping season. If they sound interesting either contact your web developer with more questions, or drop me a note at tom@mywebdept.com for more information.
AJAX is Here!
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax for short) is growing in popularity and is really changing the way we will view websites. It is a programming language that allows the content on a web page to change without actually navigating to a new page. In other words, imagine a web page as a page from a magazine. The page has pictures and words on it. You can read it, you can marvel at the pictures, but you can't actually change the pictures or the writing on the page. If you want to see more from that magazine you need to turn the page.
With a website you traditionally view a page, and can click a navigation link to view another page. Ajax alters that structure. Ajax allows specific content to be changed on a page without changing the entire page, which improves load speed and gives a sense of interactivity. In e-commerce terms, an example use of Ajax might be your product detail page. A standard product detail page gives a nice description about the product, along with a picture. If you click a link for specifications it might open a new page with the same picture but a bulleted list of specifications replacing the product description. However, with Ajax you click the specifications link and the page remains the same, no reloading the same picture, no reloading the same navigation options; however, the product description is replaced with the bulleted list of specifications. Only that section of the page that needed to be updated gets loaded and changed.
For the website owner, this level of content updating provides significantly faster load times, thus increasing user satisfaction. Plus it looks pretty darn cool.
Shopping Cart Update
You know why your shopping cart isn't a very good representation of a real shopping cart? You can't see what's inside the cart without leaving the product you're currently thinking about. In the grocery store you can see everything inside your cart while you look at products on the shelf. Well now you can do the same thing online.
Imagine a box on one side of the page showing thumbnail images of every product you've put inside your cart. Imagine that box following you around at every page you browse on the same website. You don't have to imagine anymore, now the cost of adding this functionality is far more affordable, and you should start seeing it a lot more this holiday season.
I hope this information helps you prepare for the holiday shopping season as well as give you some ideas for future upgrades. Thanks!
Tom