As the summer season ends and holiday season speedily approaches, B2C marketers’ start strategizing the holiday marketing plans. As eCommerce businesses desperately try to get ready for the forthcoming peak season, they face numerous major challenges. Gaining an outlook on the holiday eCommerce challenges will help your online business, face it, by contriving a full-proof strategy that also cuts the negative impact of holiday shopping. Therefore, it is rightly said that running a successful eCommerce business is very lucrative, yet challenging at the same time.
7 Major threats B2C Online Businesses Must Be Prepared For
- Raise in Website Traffic
Your website may be totally fortified to handle the volume of traffic you receive on a day-to-day basis, but the holiday season is noted to bring down systems because of the momentous increase in traffic and transactions. With competition in elevation, it’s imperative to reduce customer frustrations and offer the best shopping experience, irrespective of the amount of traffic you come across. Taking into account previous years traffic trends in the holidays can aid you to prepare your website to handle the increase in traffic without damaging your level of customer service.
- Responsive Website
As we all are already aware of that buyers are to a greater extent surfing and shopping on their mobile devices. The ‘Brick and Mortar’ shops have become like showrooms in many scenarios, where customers do window shopping in-store and then go online to find out the best deal. It is vital for eCommerce websites to be responsive through a range of devices, with a specific focus on mobile. Online retailers should make sure their website is flawless, easy to navigate and generally designed to be ‘mobile friendly.’ The facility to merchandise seamlessly on all devices will lead to an upsurge in sales and revenue during this peak retail period.
- Handling Product Return
It’s the unavoidable – people will certainly return items around the holiday season for various reasons. It depends totally on you how you manage those returns which will either win or lose business. You would want to provide the returns facility to your customers, such as providing fast refunds or executing a no questions asked policy. Of course, what you offer depends significantly on the nature of your products and customer base. But do it appropriately and you might very likely make a customer for the rest of the year.
- Challenges in Managing Inventory
The holiday season contributes approximately 20% of the yearly sales for a lot of businesses and this number is estimated to escalate more. The increased sales, while desired, can be an inventory management disaster. Meeting with the demand has never been more essential. Not having sufficient products in stock to fulfill demand is one of the reckless ways to lose customers during the holidays. Furthermore, make sure you have an abundant supply in stock, it’s also indispensable to efficiently manage to ship your orders to evade keeping customers waiting.
- Staff Management
One main challenge that a lot of businesses encounter is that they fail to recognize until it’s too late the decrease in staff during the holiday season. While most employees take leave during the summer for vacations, a few save time for use during the holidays. It’s a fantastic idea to hire seasonal staff not only to get support in sufficing customer demands but also to replace the absent employees.
- Keeping Up Customer Service Levels
To keep your customers delighted is always a top priority, it becomes even more crucial during the holiday season. The majority of the consumers search for the best deals and are less on the cards to show loyalty. The holidays bring terrible pressure on a company, which can cause severe failures in the quality customer service if you aren’t completely equipped. By maintaining short response time and providing prompt assistance to your customers, you can cement great, long-term customer relations.
- Promotions during Holiday
It is normal practice for eCommerce businesses to roll out Christmas promotions and that too early. The motive is to generate interest surrounding the holiday season, stimulate customers to shop more and result in an increased sales. It is necessary that retailers test their online promotions to ensure they work as projected. Shoppers do not appreciate coupon codes that doesn’t work at checkout or an advertised discount that actually doesn’t convert. Online retailers must monitor their promotions after launch to ensure that they are running efficiently and not experiencing any technical hitches.
In Conclusion
The eCommerce holiday shopping season is both awesome and overawe for online merchants. The best way retailers can fix for this chaotic time is by being aware of the challenges that are before them and implementing suitable measures to cope up with the hectic shopping period of the year.
Techno Infonet 