9 Quick e-Commerce Hacks for Year End Sales Season

The year end sales season is around the corner and many sellers are pulling up their sleeves already. The end of year sales season is indeed the holy grail of all e-commerce events and maximising the sales figures is always the priority of every retailer out there.

In this post, we are going to list some of the most important factors that should be taken into consideration to maximize your end of season sales. These points are a consolidation of major points derived from marketing, sales and website performance.

Let’s go through them quickly-

Optimize for Mobile:

This might be an overdone phrase but nonetheless, it needs to be said again. Let’s admit it. Christmas season is all about enjoyment, family reunions, and other fun stuff. This is why not many people will be sitting on their desktops. As a result of which a lot of traffic will be driven by mobile devices by users who would be looking for offers and good deals.

If your site is optimized for mobile, you can turn a lot of unintended visitors into buyers. Optimization, when mixed with discounts and time-based offers can create an “I want to buy” moment.

Overall, the usage patterns with respect to the device for the end of year sales will be similar to what we have seen on Black Friday.

Incentivize Social Sharing:

Incentivized social sharing aims to give some form of discounts to buyers if they share the product details within their social circles using the Social Media.

 

Incentivized social sharing can drive huge sales for products that are available across a lot of channels for more or less the same price. Employ the plug-ins in your storefront to get going.

Run load tests to ready your site for traffic spikes:

If you are going to sell something exciting this year, expect some heavy traffic coming to your website. Generic product types that people find cool, and are promoted with social incentives, often create a wave of traffic to the website.

It is necessary that the site be tested and calibrated with to handle a certain number of requests per second. There are a number of free tools to do that online.

Have an inventory management software ready:

Inventory Control is one of the most underrated but extremely important tasks. Especially when you are dealing with orders coming from a number of channels all at once, managing it manually can become a nightmare.

It is always best to have an inventory management software to control your inventory workflow. Orderhive’s in-app activity during the year ending sales increases significantly.

If you sell international, it is also advisable to have an inventory management system that allows you to transfer stock from one warehouse to another.

Orderhive’s system is equipped with these features and much more to navigate your business smoothly through this end of year sale madness.

If you are a new seller, you should definitely give it a try.

Create anticipation for your audience:

Timeout deals are one of the best ways to drive referral traffic and sales for year end sales. Pick a list of items that you think can drive the compulsive buying behavior of people.

It is often suggested that some form of exclusive offering is put on the landing page with a ticking clock. If you are running a Shopify storefront, you can install a ticker from the app store and start immediately.

This is a great way to launch a product. Together with the volume of traffic coming at the end of the year, your product may become an instant success.

Offer time bound discounts on abandoned carts:

Fetch user data for abandoned carts. Segment the users within your mailing lists and mail them back with a time-based discount. You can segment your users using MailChimp. Go for any paid plan and it will help you figure out the segmentation part.

One of the best things about MailChimp is the preloaded templates that make it super easy to compose effective emails. Some MailChimp templates work better for mobile. MailChimp also allows you to customize the overall e-mail format and test.

You can also employ plugins to do that for you.

Free Shipping becomes a baseline:

During “end of the year sales”, free shipping becomes a norm. This is why it is always advisable to offer free shipping for as many products as possible.

The idea is to go for products that will most likely drive high volumes of sales. This is when you are offered a lot of price breaks from your supplier. Discounted prices on orders will allow you to sell cheap and offer free shipping as well.

Contextual Upsell and Cross Sell:

Always think of integrating contextual products to upsell or cross-sell. Refer to historic data to decide product category and placement. If you are new to this entire e-commerce space, you may install a Shopify plug-in for upselling and cross-selling.

One of the things that always works for upselling and cross-selling is to conceptualize product groupings around a fast selling product.

Product groupings are very effective in visually conveying the value of the products that are offered for upsell or cross-sell.

Catchy ad Copy and email:

Creating catchy ad copies for retargeting and email marketing must be prioritized. If you have not done it yet, you should start doing it right now.

Year end sales means, the buyer will be bombarded by a lot of emails. Cutting through the noise is possible only when you come with creative ad copies and email headlines. Hire experts in copywriting and web design to build that power packed ad copy.

Overall, e-commerce trends have been very promising this year and the end of the year sale season for 2017 is destined for a great showdown. And if you have the right hacks and strategies in place now, you may wind up and go for a cheerful holiday with a smile this year.