Big Commerce stores saw a whopping 21% increase in average sales, as compared to other platforms. During Cyber Week 2017, the industry average was an increase of 17% in sales.
This clearly shows that BigCommerce has some great opportunities even this year, when it comes to holiday shopping. On all platforms, a critical factor when it comes to average sales figures is successful order processing.
If you thought card abandonment was the most common reason for lost orders, you will be surprised to learn that order processing errors from your end can reduce the average sales figures as well.
In this article, let us take a look at how you can utilize the advantages of Big Commerce and avoid order processing errors to surpass previous average sales figures during this shopping season.
A number of customers enter their addresses incorrectly unintentionally or intentionally. For instance, this BigCommerce user recently posted that their customer entered a US address and zip code, but chose to have the products delivered to an address in Jamaica, making use of free deliveries within US.
Such discrepancies can cause your store to reject orders, and cause unnecessary delays, resulting in lower average sales.
What you should do: You can quickly setup Free Shipping as an option within designated territories by going to Shipping under Setup & Tools, and allow specific shipping parameters. BigCommerce automatically prompts the customer to enter the correct address when they enter shipping address incorrectly.
Site search results are very crucial to getting customers to purchase products when they are already on your website. With a gross merchandising value (GMV) of more than 22.22% last Black Friday, it is paramount for your Big Commerce store to correct misspellings on product pages.
Customers often enter search queries wrongly, and you cannot expect them to type search key phrases correctly. This runs the risk of them not finding what they want, or encountering the dreaded not found page.
What you should do: Add common misspellings to your Big Commerce dictionaries. You can also create dedicated holiday themed landing pages, where customers quickly find curated product "no results found" page to include similar products so that shoppers find something close to what they were searching for.
Most stores will have Black Friday coupon codes, gift certificates, customer store credits, or discounts for customers. However, having to add gift certificates and coupon codes manually, and verifying them manually before the orders go through can cause a lot of delays and failed purchases.
Even if you have set internal rules for customer store credits, the process may not be simple for the customer to redeem on their chosen products.
What you should do: While BigCommerce will not let you automatically reward customers right from the admin dashboard, you can use third-party applications such as Checkout Boost to automate the process of entering gift coupons. Other applications include UpSell and Reward Camp.
Most e-commerce businesses launch extensive holiday themed campaigns for Black Friday and other sales-oriented holidays. However, they forget to create holiday-specific gift guides and other curated content.
By this, we mean, just a holiday list will not day. You will need to create gift guides and content based on Black Friday, as all holidays are not the same.
What you need to do: Find out what your customers specifically want on Black Friday, and what products sold well the last Black Friday. Understand the cultural context of Black Friday, and create holiday content specifically for this shopping day. This will not only help you rank higher in SEO, but will ensure products are found easily so that orders are processed efficiently.
To help process your orders better, consider getting your product feed into Google Shopping.
Google Shopping has grown incredibly popular, and being there will help you gain customer loyalty and recognition. According to this BigCommerce article, Google Shopping feeds fare better than other types of PPC when it comes to conversion rates.
What you need to do: Create specific Black Friday campaigns for Google Shopping and align your product pages with the content of your Google Shopping campaigns. By doing so, you have a great chance of ensuring that products are found, the right Black Friday coupons are added, and that orders are processed successfully.
With Black Friday registering more average sales rate than ever before, and with BigCommerce doing slightly better than other platforms, it is important for you to optimize your store quickly, so that you can avoid order processing errors.
Begin with ensuring that address mismatches are avoided, and that customer misspellings are taken into consideration. in addition, make it easy for your customers to redeem Black Friday coupons and create content specific to Black Friday.
Last but not the least, run a targeted Google Shopping campaign to bring traffic to your website, while other measures ensure successful order processing.
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