4 Ways Online Retailers Can Shine This Holiday Season
December 15, 2015

Sven Hammar
Apica

Share this

It is the busiest time of the year in many retail industries, and there is a substantial uptick in customers looking to spend money. The National Retail Federation notes that online shoppers are expected to spend $105 billion during the 2015 holiday season. The following four tips can help online retailers get the most out of the holiday season traffic boom:

1. Check your infrastructure

Do not become a casualty of your own success. Make sure your website infrastructure can handle all the extra holiday visitors. Inadequate hosting capabilities can cause your site to go down when there are too many people browsing your site, leading customers to other websites to buy what you are selling. Professional load testing services are an excellent option to make sure your sites will stay online with the increased traffic flow on both web and mobile platforms.

According to American Express, Cyber Monday sees a 170 percent increase in web traffic, while Black Friday sees a 114 percent uptick when compared to the average business day. The second and third Mondays in December and the second Tuesday in December round out the season’s most heavily trafficked days. Your site infrastructure needs to have enough overhead to handle at least a 170 percent increase in web traffic over the average.

2. Mobile first mentality

In 2014, 60 percent of Amazon.com shoppers were using mobile devices to browse products during the holiday season. A comScore study found that 60 percent of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, and an upward trend is projected. It is common for websites to neglect the mobile in favor of the desktop website — so a retailer can gain a substantial competitive advantage by offering a user-friendly, fast mobile site.

Tweaking a mobile web site can be a substantial undertaking, so it is something to look at far in advance of the holiday season. Responsive web design, which generates the content display based on the screen size of the device, can streamline the web development process, making both the desktop and mobile websites functionally identical.

3. Cut down load times

Your site does not shine in the holiday season simply by staying online. It needs to be able to serve content to an increased number of visitors without sacrificing speed. According to KissMetrics, the typical website visitor will wait only 6 to 10 seconds for a web page to load before abandoning it. The longer your page takes to load, the more likely you are to lose visitors.

Retailers can shine during the holiday season by ensuring their pages load as quickly as possible. Making sure the online graphics use compressed JPG images, reducing the number of ads displayed on the page, and removing unnecessary code are all effective ways to decrease load times.

4. Ad retargeting

Ad retargeting is a practice that determines the placement of advertisements on websites based on a visitor’s browsing history. This offers retailers a huge opportunity to bring back customers who were looking at a product, but did not actually purchase it, to complete the sale. Generally speaking, only two percent of visitors actually buy something from a website on their first visit.

The practice helps target potential customers that have already established an interest in what you are selling as opposed to using other metrics like visiting a specific site or living in a specific area. Consider purchasing retargeted ads through a service like Facebook, opposed to traditional advertising, to get the most out of your promotions budget.

Online shoppers will spend more than ever this holiday season, but they are also becoming more demanding when it comes to e-commerce web/mobile reliability, quality, speed and service. The objective is to seize that spike in potential customers while it is here. Make sure that you are one of the online retailers that shine this year.

Sven Hammar is Chief Strategy Officer and Founder of Apica
Share this

The Latest

April 23, 2024

While most companies are now deploying cloud-based technologies, the 2024 Secure Cloud Networking Field Report from Aviatrix found that there is a silent struggle to maximize value from those investments. Many of the challenges organizations have faced over the past several years have evolved, but continue today ...

April 22, 2024

In our latest research, Cisco's The App Attention Index 2023: Beware the Application Generation, 62% of consumers report their expectations for digital experiences are far higher than they were two years ago, and 64% state they are less forgiving of poor digital services than they were just 12 months ago ...

April 19, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 5, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the network source of truth ...

April 18, 2024

A vast majority (89%) of organizations have rapidly expanded their technology in the past few years and three quarters (76%) say it's brought with it increased "chaos" that they have to manage, according to Situation Report 2024: Managing Technology Chaos from Software AG ...

April 17, 2024

In 2024 the number one challenge facing IT teams is a lack of skilled workers, and many are turning to automation as an answer, according to IT Trends: 2024 Industry Report ...

April 16, 2024

Organizations are continuing to embrace multicloud environments and cloud-native architectures to enable rapid transformation and deliver secure innovation. However, despite the speed, scale, and agility enabled by these modern cloud ecosystems, organizations are struggling to manage the explosion of data they create, according to The state of observability 2024: Overcoming complexity through AI-driven analytics and automation strategies, a report from Dynatrace ...

April 15, 2024

Organizations recognize the value of observability, but only 10% of them are actually practicing full observability of their applications and infrastructure. This is among the key findings from the recently completed Logz.io 2024 Observability Pulse Survey and Report ...

April 11, 2024

Businesses must adopt a comprehensive Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) strategy, says Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT analyst research firm. This strategy is crucial to bridge the significant observability gap within today's complex IT infrastructures. The recommendation is particularly timely, given that 99% of enterprises are expanding their use of the Internet as a primary connectivity conduit while facing challenges due to the inefficiency of multiple, disjointed monitoring tools, according to Modern Enterprises Must Boost Observability with Internet Performance Monitoring, a new report from EMA and Catchpoint ...

April 10, 2024

Choosing the right approach is critical with cloud monitoring in hybrid environments. Otherwise, you may drive up costs with features you don’t need and risk diminishing the visibility of your on-premises IT ...

April 09, 2024

Consumers ranked the marketing strategies and missteps that most significantly impact brand trust, which 73% say is their biggest motivator to share first-party data, according to The Rules of the Marketing Game, a 2023 report from Pantheon ...