It’s not too late! Last minute tips to prepare for the festive e-commerce traffic rush

Fortunately it’s not too late to save yourself from faltering or badly designed online storefronts leaking revenue over the next few weeks.

If you’re in the ‘worried’ camp, there’s still time to fine-tune design, development and user experience. Customers visiting your website want to find what they are looking for, and fast. Remember, your competitor’s websites are only a click away.

Similarly, optimising the performance, availability and scalability of the hosting infrastructure powering your e-commerce site is vital. If your website crashes, so will a customer’s perception of your company.

Here are some tips for getting your online store in shape and squeezing every last possible bit of revenue out of it over the festive season.

Analyse your site’s history

Analysing historic traffic patterns can give you an idea of what to expect. When will you hit your peak traffic load? How many visitors at any given minute? How many simultaneous checkouts? How does your marketing impact your traffic flow?

Last year many of our customers saw peak traffic when the sales started between Christmas and New Year, rather than before Christmas, with many experiencing their busiest day on Boxing Day. If you haven’t historically tracked this type of information, plan to keep track of your website’s history this year.

Consider the cloud

Talk to your hosting provider about what scenarios you may face over the holiday shopping season to see if a cloud solution can help you out. This could be bursting in to the public cloud to manage massive traffic spikes or utilising a private cloud to increase existing server utilisation.

Over-prepare and build in redundancies to protect your revenue stream

Determine your tolerance for downtime and then choose the back-up and recovery solution that best suits your needs. Look for a hosting provider with multiple data centres and the ability to back up to other locations. This will help to ensure your website is up and running when you need it to be.

Provide shopping guides

With a long list of friends and family to buy for and so many products to choose from, holiday shopping can be overwhelming at best. As part of your planning, think about creating shopping and buying guides to make it easy for shoppers visiting your website to make decisions when they’re not purchasing for themselves. This is your opportunity to showcase your products and demonstrate expertise, while giving customers a reason to buy from you instead of the manufacturer or another retailer.

Think social

If you are not already leveraging social media to help drive traffic to your website now is the time. As you plan for the holidays, spend some time establishing a presence and voice on social media sites such Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Rather than jumping in to it all at once, choose one site to start with. Find out where your customers are active online and start there. Then, when you feel you’ve mastered one platform, add another. Be sure to have a plan before you start posting – how often will you post? What type of content will you be posting? And, most importantly, what are you trying to achieve by using social media?

If you’re already using social media and have developed a solid following on a site such as Facebook or Twitter, consider trying out something new.

Have you explored Pinterest?

When it comes to e-commerce, every millisecond and every transaction matters to your bottom line. Don’t let poor site performance; unreliable infrastructure or security vulnerabilities derail the best-laid plans for online retail.