December is upon us, which means the festive season – and the biggest shopping period of the year – has officially begun, so it would be prudent to take advantage of all that present-buying and make your e-commerce site as appealing to buyers as possible.

According to the Bank of England, a typical UK household spends over £740 more in December compared with other months of the year, an increase of 29 per cent.

The majority of this goes on clothing, footwear and textiles, followed by furniture, specialist food stores, and computers and phones. Surprisingly, spending on books, alcohol, tobacco, and home electronics makes up less than two per cent of our spending throughout the year.

Therefore, this shows that customers are not just focused on shopping for their Christmas dinner and festive treats, but other, more costly, purchases that could be relevant to your business.

Improve website performance

To capitalise on this increase in shoppers, it is essential you make your website performance as flawless as possible. Any glitch in the e-commerce experience, fiddling around with scrolling, or slow download time is likely to result in the buyer simply going to another site for their goods.

Dealer Scope suggests: “Make sure to test your site performance thoroughly well before the holiday shopping season begins. It is better to have your site fail when you have 0.3 orders per second than 5.4 orders per second.”

Update security

Online shoppers are pretty savvy these days and are unlikely to purchase form your site if it does not look secure. Therefore, it is important to install an SSL certificate, so customers know their purchase is safe; enable a two-factor authentication process for their added protection; and make the refund policy clear.

Reviews

These days, people do not even buy a belt if it does not have four out of five stars, so it is important to have a review section on each product and encourage your customers to rate their purchase.

A report from Econsultancy revealed two-thirds of consumers are more likely to purchase from a website that provides reviews. Reevoo found reviews lead to an 18 per cent increase in sales.

This will not only inform other buyers it is a popular purchase, but that it functions well and looks good. Seeing customers satisfied with the product will certainly draw other buyers in and result in a greater number of sales.

Intelligent websites

Something that will drive more business your way this season is having a website that allows customers find exactly what they are looking for, or, in some cases, even things they did not know they wanted. Installing a search bar, for instance, is a good thing to do, saving customers time scrolling through thousands of products so they can locate their exact item.

Similarly, it is wise to provide images and links to related items, as they might see other goods that are even better than what they intended to buy. They might even end up spotting several things they had not been looking for, filling up their basket with more than they had planned.

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