Optimize Holiday Readiness with Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Holidays drive sales, hence a significant event for e-commerce stores. The traffic increases significantly during these seasons and many times sites slow down and become unresponsive resulting in the loss of sales, customers or both. The holiday season has a major impact on the annual sales as shoppers plan and prepare to spend their saved money on these important days. Therefore, brands and retailers should begin with pre-holiday planning to maximize their sales. Along with campaigns, strategies, promotions, etc., the retailers pre-holiday season preparations must include putting due attention to cache, payment methods, site performance, etc. that are the backbone of maximizing the sales. The shopper does not want to experience delays during their commerce journey whether it is search results, checkout process or login.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud with all its features and capabilities allows brands to get ready for these mega sale events and prepare ahead of time with pre-holiday season strategies. Let us discuss some of these critical items that play a crucial role in maximizing sales during these high traffic seasons:
Storefront response time
Optimizing cache
Third-party integrations
Customization
Promotions
Mobile payment options
Shipment methods
Holiday readiness review
Storefront Response Time
Almost 50% of the shoppers expect a page to be loaded within two seconds and 40% switch to other sites if it takes longer. Retailers should focus on pages that are most visited on their sites and make sure that these high traffic pages render within the desired time. These pages include home page, product list page, cart page and checkout process.
Optimizing Cache
Caching helps in loading contents to the page quickly. Almost 90% of the editorial data like home page and 60% of product related contents can be cached to improve site performance. As caching consumes resources, it is better to increase caching for high traffic pages as needed and minimize it for the less visited pages and less used contents. For optimizing cache features, use of analytics tools and speed audits must be conducted regularly.
Third-party Integrations
Brands must take into account the performance impact by each additional component touched by shoppers while completing a transaction. Hence, while integrating third party systems like payment methods, address validators, store locators, tax calculator, etc. they must follow best practices and make sure integrated systems will sustain high traffic during the holiday season.
Customization
Artificial Intelligence is now an integral part to customize and personalize contents on ecommerce sites. Shoppers appreciate if retailers are considering their preferences as it makes it easy for them to find the desired items. Commerce Cloud Einstein can be very helpful in this regard and it can be configured with a few numbers of clicks.
Promotions
Based on historical data and trends, Brands and retailers must strategize to come up with impactful promotions throughout the holiday season. Design multiple strategy approach to alternate them often. Allow product personalization like having custom text or logo color, etc. Provide consistency in a shopping experience, use content slots for displaying promotional messages and deals so it can be manipulated easily and quickly without impacting the code base.
Mobile Payment Options
The one-tap mobile payment option has a great impact in terms of sales. Retailers with this option have witnessed a 14% increase. Conversion rate with mobile wallets is almost double than that for the non-mobile options. But just implementing the payment option is not enough, it must be optimized for mobile devices as well. Shoppers should find products easily in just a few taps. The mobile friendly design must be considered, to minimize product and other details on smaller screens.
Shipment Methods
Limited shipment method is also one of the top 10 reasons that shoppers abandon their carts. Multiple shipment methods should be offered, including in-store pickup, which is must for the holiday season.
Holiday Readiness Review
Before the start of the holiday season, Brands must make sure that all operational aspects of the site are equipped to handle high traffic and provide flawless shopping journey to the customers. Below are the key items to be reviewed:
System Resources
Search Settings
Sorting Rules
Holiday Information Pages & Navigations
Royal Cyber
Royal Cyber resources have deep expertise in Salesforce Commerce Cloud and help Brands in fine-tuning above mentioned vital aspects and conducting holiday readiness review for their e-commerce sites.
We help you in keeping your site up to the mark to fulfill customers’ expectations during holidays and high traffic seasons. Using our automated load testing and specialized monitoring tools, we pinpoint sources impacting site performances including third-party integrations, design and implement solutions, resulting into more conversion rates and great customer experience during normal as well as high traffic seasons.
Is your website ready to handle additional traffic during the Holiday Season?
