Checklist: Is Your eCommerce Store Ready for Black Friday & Cyber Monday?
Posted by Amanda Brooke on Fri, Nov 20, 2009 @ 01:47 PM
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the busiest online shopping days of the year!
Black Friday is the first day after Thanksgiving, and it is traditionally one of the biggest shopping days of the entire year, for ecommerce as well as brick and mortar stores.
Cyber Monday is the next Monday after Thanksgiving, and this is another BIG day for online stores! The whole idea behind Cyber Monday is that people are back at work after the long holiday weekend, and ready to shop online.
If your online store isn’t up to snuff, you may lose a lot of revenue on Black Friday and Cyber Monday!
Here is a checklist of things you should do to make sure that your ecommerce store is ready for the shopping surge on Black Friday and Cyber Monday:
- Make sure there are no broken links, slow loading pages or dreaded 404 page errors. Your website needs to be up to speed in every way and the keyword is SPEED. Internet shoppers are notoriously impatient. If your site is too slow for any reason, they will leave.
- Be sure to submit your products and/or updated sale prices to the comparison shopping sites such as Shopzilla and Pricegrabber. You might be surprised how many consumers check with these sites before buying, shopping around and comparing prices. So, you do need to be there!
- Check to make sure that your SEO is up to par. Make sure that your images, titles, categories and everything else is fully Search Engine Optimized!
- Do make a point of decorating and tweaking your online store to reflect the holiday mood. There are lots of free images and graphics available on the internet for you to spruce up your website.
- Make sure that all of your landing pages are optimized and that you have landing pages in place for your holiday ads.
- You should be offering electronic gift cards! A lot of shoppers habitually purchase e-gift cards to send the people on their gift list because it is quick and easy. So, if you don’t have something set up for this---do it!
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the biggest online shopping days of the year!
Don’t get caught unprepared and miss out on all those sales for your online store!