The holiday season is somewhat that everyone awaits for the whole year. Not only the people celebrate holidays with proper pomp and shows but also take part in various fun activities. Instance, shopping, and outing are two of the most top things that stand somewhere on top of the holiday season activities. Not only do the customers await the best offers in this period but also, do not hesitate to buy from new vendors. The following factor makes the eCommerce holiday season more relative for the online seller community. Especially black Friday. Black Friday is one of the most proficient days in online shopping history.
Why Black Friday is so Important!!
Customers recognize Black Friday as the beginning of online shopping deals.
Respecting the customers’ expectations, online sellers do not miss a single chance to provide the best Black Friday Deals to customers. The other amazing fact about the Black Friday online shopping season is that just after two days, Cyber Monday takes place. Which is undoubtedly tailored specially for online shopping.
7 Incredible ideas for the Black Friday Shopping Season:
The worldwide online seller community tries various marketing strategies to attract more customers to their shop.
Whether it is special deals or promotional events, in the end, the final goal is to make the most out of Black Friday Sale.
Moreover, we have tried to cover the top 7 strategies for Black Friday Deals in the below article. So, let’s find out.
Keep Your VIP Customer Base Tracked:
As a well-known fact, the top 5 to 10% of VIP customers provide almost half of total sales in the Holiday season.
Not only you should prepare special deals for your near and dear customer base but also try to be specific with offers. Instance, they will be waiting for the best deals in the whole year to be released in this best Black Friday Deals Event.
Thus, it might be the right option to go with higher discounts on listings.
Early Advertising:
Early advertising is the other best strategy you can go with this Black Friday Shopping Season.
The reason behind the same is that you can try your hands on various strategies and keep the best one ready for your best Black Friday Deals. Various online sellers do the same by running Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and marketing deals.
So, if you are looking for where to start, early advertising might be the other pick for your business.
Test Your Website Thoroughly:
The most important factor in the eCommerce business industry is a properly functional website. Thus, you should always do some health checks before going for Black Friday Sales.
As soon as the customers visit the websites, they start judging the quality of the product based on the feel and performance provided by the platform.
The same reason makes website health checks more important before starting preparation for the holiday season.
Additional Customizations:
If you are planning to make some modifications or install some additional features in your store. Starting before the Black Friday Deals season is the right time.
For example, you can offer gifts with the products and allows the customers to send gift cards on your website. And can even go with various creative ideas.
At Knowband, we also offer custom plugins specially designed for the holiday season. Instance, Spin and win, Website Decoration Effect, Deal Timer, Gift Card Manager, and much more to explore in our products list.
Enhance Your Order Flow:
One of the main reasons for website abandonment is the poorly maintained checkout process.
An easy checkout process not only encourages the customers to complete the orders but also improves the chances of returning orders.
For the Black Friday Holiday season, the other preparation you can go with is to work on your online store’s checkout process. You can also integrate the payment options with your website to improve the checkout experience.
Likewise, Knowband offers one-page checkout extensions for the PrestaShop and OpenCart online platforms.
Cross-Sell and Upsell:
Cross-Sell and upselling are two of the most beneficial strategies in the online business industry. Upsell not only increases the margins for the admins but also keeps the customers engaged with the website.
On the other hand, you can use Knowband’s Related product modules for enhancing the chances of cross-selling on your eCommerce website.
Don’t Hesitate with Experiments:
This holiday season, if you are having some creative ideas in mind for your store, go with it. Customers await the never-like-before Black Friday deals on the occasion of the event.
So, don’t hesitate to try experiments this holiday season.
In the End,
With a professional touch of 12+ years of experience, we at Knowband can make your store ready for the holiday season.
Furthermore, we have also taken care of our business customer relationship by offerings discounts on listings. As a gift from our side, online eCommerce sellers can take joy from the following discounts offered on the entire inventory.
From the product page to contact forms, every single aspect of your website could potentially lead to a user’s decision to make a purchase. If you want to create trust with your clients, investing in a professional website is a must, and improving that trust is essential if you want your e-commerce store to succeed.
When building an e-commerce website, web design is critical. Successful web design for e-commerce is all about using the appropriate colors, fonts, pictures, words, and graphics to attract visitors to make a purchase. The design of your e-commerce website should attract prospective customers, provide an excellent user interface, and show your shop in the best light.
1. Think Like a website visitor
Your website should not have any content which makes them feel uncomfortable when you expect them to share sensitive information like credit card details. The point is, if you want your visitors to take you seriously, you need to convince them that you take yourself seriously, and competent web design is the best way to do that. Optimize the checkout page design from a visitor’s point of view.
2. Keep it Simple
The web design of the checkout page plays a pivotal role because it is the page that decides your fortune. Try to keep the design of the checkout page simple. Utilize maximum white spaces while designing the checkout page but keep it clean. Various layout designs are available for making the One Page Checkout appear clean, easy to navigate, which makes the purchase easy no matter what you are selling.
3. Show relevant Product Image on Checkout Page
In the world of web design, it is observed that photos improve conversions and that is even more true when it comes to e-commerce. If there are no pictures of the product they choose to buy (or only a single picture of poor quality), they will feel more reluctant to make the purchase, and as a result, the conversions will tank.
No one is going to buy the sight of a commodity unseen. You need to show them what they’re buying through high-quality product images if you want people to purchase your product.
4. Use color as an advantage
Different colors inspire different feelings and every color has its significant emotion attached to it. Play with those emotionally inspiring colors while designing your website pages to make your customers feel attached throughout the shopping. Use scale, contrast, and harmony to make it more appealing.
You can add bright and colorful buttons like red for the ‘buy now’ button which is well known for excitement and passion. The point is, color is one of the most important tools in your design toolbox, and it can have a major effect on your e-commerce design if you know how to use it.
5. Have a systematic approach:
Whether you are using a single page checkout or a multiple-step checkout, the web page design of the checkout page should have indicators that navigate the customer to the next step and informs them about the progress of the process.
On both, One Page Checkout and Multi-Step checkout, it’s useful to place a progress meter while making the layout design. If you place all of the elements on one page, it looks interactive. Studies suggest that the systematic approach by delineating the stages lead to higher conversions.
6. Use Security badges
People, especially new visitors, often question the security level of a website. They do not easily trust a website and often feel a little skittish sharing their payment information. Make them feel that the website is trustworthy and that their payments are safe. Show them the security badges to build faith. It may include the payment choice logos, Norton, McAfee, Padlocks security badges, or even a short text that reads ‘Quick and safe payment’.
The website should be designed keeping this in mind and do not forget to take an SSL certificate because a secured website can maintain trust throughout.
7. Don’t distract expected clients
After all the efforts you have put to entice the customer, do not distract them when they are about to make the final checkout. Every eCommerce web design includes functionality for showing relevant products for cross-selling.
Displaying related product images on the checkout page can put a full stop to the potential lead. This can be a distraction if not done right. Avoid doing any such mistake which can cost you a potential customer.
8. Optimize and make it mobile responsive
It is official now, as the most common way to browse the inter-webs, mobile has surpassed desktop and also shopping requires that.
If you want to catch consumers who want to shop on their phones or tablets, you need to ensure that your website design is completely mobile responsive. Millennial prefer mobile shopping and a checkout page which is not mobile responsive and slow loading can kill conversion. Make web design and UI mobile friendly.
9. Consider using One Page Checkout
A clunky checkout page can kill conversions and sales. You need to make the process of buying as easy, straightforward, and pain-free as possible to accomplish your goal.
Consider using One Page Checkout and make it crystal clear about the procedure: what data you need to process the transaction (and where they need to enter it), the various delivery options available (and how much they cost), and what to do in case their order is troublesome or they need to make a return. When the purchase is complete, guide your clients to a confirmation page so that they know it’s all gone through.
One Page Checkout offers Guest checkout, social login, multiple layout options, several payment gateways, shipping choices, and much more. Its layout design appears to be simple. You can replace the existing checkout page with One Page Checkout which specially designed to make the process simpler.
10. Allow Guest Checkout
A mandatory registration before purchase seems annoying. You can make the registration process optional for the visitors with the One Page Checkout by giving Guest Checkout as a choice. Having a popup saying ‘Sign in to build an account is irritating!!’
People on the One Page Checkout would like to share information to keep the track of shipment. If a user is in a rush, then you can help them buy in less time with guest checkout. The One Page Checkout module allows your clients to checkout from the checkout page as visitors.
Wrapping Up
It can be tricky to design an e-commerce website and the checkout page, but now that you know the top e-commerce checkout page web design tips, you have everything you need to design a website that not only looks great but converts like crazy.
Then what are you waiting for? Redesign your website and give a new look to your online store with these tips. Contact us at support@knowband.com for any eCommerce support.
The holiday season is at its peak and taking advantage of Christmas sales is not creepy at all. You just need to adapt some savvy marketing tactics like giveaways and viral contests to grow your business this Christmas.
Witty start-ups are taking advantage of the boom of mobile technology and social media to reinvent tired business models while existing brands such as Amazon and ETSY are aiming to target the millennials with wearable technology.
Think again if you think that such creativity is just the realm of nimble start-ups or major brands. It is equally a case of innovation for small businesses and newly launched e-stores, with mobile disruption spreading into the business industry.
This Christmas you can uplift your sales using social media pages by running viral contests and giveaways.
The trend towards Christmas or occasional giveaways and viral contests represent a huge opportunity for small online businesses to grow their very audience right up to the last minute and this will eventually increase your sales.
But only businesses with the right technology in place will be able to take advantage of this.
What is a Giveaway?
A giveaway is an act or an example of giving away something. The giveaway, especially a gift or premium is given with every new subscription to a magazine or a page. People often run them to increase their followers and to increase brand awareness.
You run a contest or give a gift to the person who completes the task. Running a giveaway is always an excellent strategy for someone trying to reach a new audience, engage their followers, generate leads, and drive an effectively infinite array of powerful acts that will help you achieve success and achieve your business goals, no matter what industry you work in.
How do Giveaways and viral contests work?
This Christmas, you can run a giveaway on your social media page like on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. This is how people run giveaways on Instagram. They will ask you to follow some steps like reposting their post in your story, tag a few of your friends and like your posts, etc.
How are you nurturing your viewership?
People do not like to buy from new brands; they prefer buying from personal recommendations.
And how do you get your brand referred to and recommended by people?
This method of discovering and cultivating the traffic into raving fans usually includes:
Creating advertisement traffic, content blogging, organic social posting, etc.
Capturing the email address for that traffic and retargeting them
Bringing up the leads.
Eventually, after weeks, converting the person with email or followup
The ‘Prize’ should be worth the efforts
A list of things you need to remember when choosing your contest or giveaway award for Christmas sales is below.
Is it attractive and unique? If they miss out on this once in a lifetime chance, would people be upset?
Are they shareable? A clothing store, for instance, could give away $1,000 store credit or they might do a personal shopping spree. The winner will be fitted, sized and styled and it would be very special. What one do you think is easier to share?
How precious is the prize? If the grand prize was a $5 phone case, you wouldn’t share a contest with your buddies, but you would put in the effort to make the prize a personalized phone case and headsets. It doesn’t have to be a value either you want a high perceived value to be targeted at.
This Christmas, run viral contests with giveaways
Instagram competitions in a short period of time and with little effort will help you maximize your follower count.
Of course, there are other ways to gather more followers, but to raise brand awareness; you want to use every instrument in your arsenal.
Contests on Instagram will also help you gain more engagement.
Compared to standard’ content, posts related to Instagram contests appear to receive around 64x more comments and 3.5x more likes.
Best practices for running Instagram contests and giveaways
You need to be aware of some major best practices before you run your first contest.
Failure to understand these best practices may mean you’re going against Instagram’s guidelines.
It could also lead to lackluster results being generated by your contest, which can equate to a lot of wasted effort.
But what are the best practices like these?
The first is to ensure that a consistent and thorough outline is written for your contest.
When writing your content outline, make sure to cover:
Set the RULES
The ELIGIBILITY criteria
Any LIMITS on who is eligible to join
The PRIZE
DEADLINE for the contest
When the winner is revealed
Doing it this way makes it easier for you to remain on the right side of Instagram’s promotion guidelines. Some of the pretty Giveaway ideas are discussed below:
List of some contest and giveaway ideas to cater more
1. Invite by a tag
Ask your existing followers to tag a friend in the comment section or you can ask them to follow your page.
They can enter the competition and become eligible to win the prize.
This contest format does a fantastic job of expanding the organic scope of your profile.
That’s because they’ll actually get a notification until people are tagged by others.
These individuals will then search your profile and probably become a follower.
Instead of asking people to tag someone randomly, you might recommend that they tag someone they think deserves to win instead.
The winner of the contest for this type of format would be the person who has been tagged, and not the person who left the original comment. Follow us on social media. View our last video and follow the steps.
2. Repost and win
On Instagram, you can run giveaways that enable users to repost the giveaway announcement on their own feed.
Just make sure you have them add a defined hashtag and tag you in the post so that you can track entries.
For Christmas holiday sales, this is a perfect way to attract a wider audience to your brand and competition, build visibility, and kickstart customer relationships.
The downside of this form of the giveaway is that constant reposts can seem spammy, and Instagram does not actually have a native way of reposting images.
3. Like and comment to win
Source: Instagram
The simplest form of giveaway that you can run on Instagram is one that users can join by liking your message, following you on Instagram, and tagging a comment with their friends.
These are all fantastic ways to increase interaction, grow your followers, and introduce your brand to a wider audience, of course.
4. Selfie contest
You ask people to post a picture of themselves with a selfie contest while they use your product, or with the product in the background somewhere.
This contest format is particularly useful for a company because it helps to teach potential customers how to use a product. It’s a great type of content created by users.
Create a distinctive hashtag while writing the description for a selfie contest and then ask people to use this hashtag if they share their images.
By looking for the hashtag on Instagram, you will find the photos people have submitted for this contest.
Select the photo that you feel is best at the end of the contest.
5. Run Challenge Contest
A challenging contest will work wonders if you are in a place where you need to put together a contest in a short period of time.
In this competition format, you only need to come up with a simple challenge for individuals to face, and the individual who solves the challenge wins.
There’s no need for the challenge to be complex. In reality, simpler competitions usually attract more social interaction and involvement.
6. Voting contests
You can try posting a series of photos to Instagram and have users vote on their favorite in the comments for a chance to win a small reward if you want to get some quick reviews or just improve interaction. You can get your audience to vote on something specifically relevant to your brands, such as their favorite product or variant, or something more abstract like a desired holiday destination.
Some more Giveaway contest ideas for Christmas Sales:
There are many more contests that can be run over the Instagram platform or any other social media platform to boost sales before Christmas.
You can run a hashtag contest, comment and win a contest, follow and win a contest, post a photo contest by asking them to share a picture on Instagram or Facebook with your product and Instagram holiday hashtag related to your page.
You can even run contests in collaboration.
Collaboration contest increases your customer base because more the organizers more will the participants.
Giveaways can be used to push many useful acts, but there might be none that is quite as powerful as a fan-made content generation. There are many kinds of content that can improve your promotional efforts.
What results you should expect from Giveaways and contests:
Contests are viral and have the potential to generate traffic, leads, and social media followers, as described above. You will have to plan your contests accordingly if you want to accomplish one or more of these goals.
Some examples of contest goals are here:
Boost social media followers
Increase your website traffic
Generate potential leads
Grow your email subscribers
More clients, more sales
Wrapping up:
Each industry has a peak season of its own. For many e-commerce vendors, Christmas is the busiest time of year, Easter sees a massive increase in chocolate sales, and Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day are popular for florists.
If there is a holiday that suits your product’s increased interest, then running a giveaway is a perfect way to capitalize on the increased interest to attract attention to your product and push action.
You can drop a comment if you have any crazy giveaway ideas or if you have already run a contest on your social media then do let us know how it went.
Every website design has to be proficient and fully functional and achieving this takes expert guidance. There are several important website elements that you need to consider before designing one. Be it a blogging website, social media, eCommerce, or a portfolio, you need to keep the design eye-catching.
Efficient website design may be the difference between a new conversion and a failed chance, whether the purpose is to raise brand recognition or to sell a product or service. Your website is how consumers learn what your brand is all about. For a website, the last thing you want is to discourage site visitors from being customers.
Below are some important website elements that will help you when considering your next website design.
Choose a domain name and web hosting wisely
The most important website element for your success is to select the correct domain name for your website before the design and development. If you choose the wrong domain name, converting later without damaging your brand and search rankings can be a hassle.
That’s why selecting the right domain name from the start is extremely important!
Don’t get tricked for low price domains but stick with .com and you can use keywords while looking for a domain name. You can take web hosting from a reliable source.
Identify your target audience
Targeting a particular market does not mean that you exclude individuals that do not meet the requirements. Instead, focus marketing enables you to concentrate your marketing budgets and brand message on a particular demographic that is more likely than other markets. This is a way of reaching potential customers and creating a business that is far more accessible, efficient, and effective.
Checkout your competitive companies and brands, analyze your products, and optimize the product designs, make a user persona, and do not forget to consider the physiographic behavior of your target customers. Recognize and understand the demand for the implementation of a better website design element.
Mobile Responsive is the top priority
Around 5.2billion people use mobile phones and out of which 3.5billion use a smartphone. This number itself defines the significance of a mobile-friendly website. Why do we need a mobile-friendly website?
A mobile-friendly interface makes a site more available.
Improved experience with consumers.
A responsive design of websites is cost-effective.
A responsive mobile website improves revenues.
A mobile-friendly website ranks well in Google search.
Interactive Web design and layout can compel
Rising numbers of UX / UI designers are now adding interactive and dynamic components to their websites, such as hover states, audio or video media, scrolling interactions, and more, in the anticipation that the interactive elements will attract and inspire more audiences to read and engage with the content of the site.
Visitors would be confused while waiting for a website to load. Nearly half of web visitors expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and within 3 seconds they might leave a site that is not loaded. It will help load your site faster by optimizing image sizes.
Hence, it is important to optimize your website’s loading time.
Write impressive content
Both great architecture and great content provide a powerful web design. Great content can attract and influence tourists by turning them into customers using persuasive language.
You can write blogs, tell your brand stories to build customer’s loyalty and trust.
Content writing makes it possible for your brand to create coherent pieces of data. Consistency is one of the important factors in deciding your company’s growth and success, especially in brand messaging.
Navigate your visitors with Call to action
Another key element on a website is the call to action, serving as a signpost that lets the user know what to do next. The user may not know the next steps to take to buy a product or sign up for a newsletter without a specific CTA and is likely to leave the web without accomplishing their mission. How CTA can help you optimize the consumer decision-making process is discussed in this blog.
Social Media is the key
Many companies claim that just getting their own website is enough to stand out from their rivals, but the platform would still struggle to attract a significant percentage of the people who use the internet to look for new businesses without a Facebook page to support it.
To increase brand awareness, add social media share links on your blog posts and product page so that the user can share the link. Social media is an important website element to establish a brand’s identity.
Also, you can add your social media platform icons which can redirect the customer to your social media pages.
FAQs and Contact Information Page
FAQs: Companies can clearly not afford to keep clients waiting in this hyper-competitive environment. In addition, products and services are also correlated with queries that occur frequently in the thoughts of users multiple times. Businesses should also ensure that they have a dedicated Frequently Asked Questions page that covers all the basics of their company, website, product(s), and/or service(s).
Contact Information: It is important that your website shows extensive contact details prominently on your website. This is a strong strategy for improving the reputation of the organization.
SEO is an important website element
In the world, about 96% of netizens search on Google when they are looking for something be it a synonym or a service. So, in the first few results of a Google search, all websites buckle down on their SEO to turn up. An important step in developing a website is to establish a responsive website.
The bottom line
Business owners from all sectors can maximize their chances of a successful website project by keeping these ten factors in mind, ensuring their expectations are met and the overall design supports their business objectives.
Interested in getting more tips and tricks for necessary website elements and design ideas? Subscribe to our newsletter for daily updates on eCommerce. For any eCommerce website development assistance, you can write to us at knowband@support.com.
The coronavirus pandemic is forcing eCommerce businesses to rethink the store’s UI, design, and make some sparking development for the upcoming events and activities in the holiday haul. In short, make room for the shoppers who strictly maintain distance and avoid public places for the holiday celebration.
Adapting to restricted travel, increased online shopping, and families not getting together as normal means mapping tactics and navigating campaigns where they are: at home. It means spending more on digital platforms. Your eCommerce store needs a makeover before the Black Friday sale and you being a holidaymaker can plan its design well in advance.
Holiday prep includes website decoration, applying attractive colorful themes, banners with greetings, and promotional coupons that can drive them crazy. To convert window shoppers, fun elements like a gamified fortune wheel popup will work. You can even sell custom products on your store with unique designs, personalized gift ideas, or offer gift cards to indecisive buyers who want to give something to their loved ones.
To compete, eCommerce businesses do everything to stand out from the crowd. There are options to design the store without taking the developer’s help. So, you can make impactful adjustments and changes in the pages even if you are a code freezer. Add some pocket-friendly playful modules to your online store and give a customer-centric design to it.
A Gamification popup during holidays will not only increase customer engagement but also delivers an amazing shopping experience.
Games are always attractive and proven to be the best for customer engagement. An entry popup with a gamified interface like Spin and Win can straight away gives a better customer experience to the visitors.
The Spin and Win module can be used as an entry pop-up, exit pop-up, and email subscription module. The user can also add custom text or a greeting to it during the holiday sale.
Click here to read client reviews on how it is changing the customer shopping experience.
The module is available for popular eCommerce platforms like PrestaShop, OpenCart, and Magento.
If you have developed a mobile app with KnowBand’s mobile app builder plugin, then adding Spin and Win to your website is a win-win. The two modules are highly compatible!
2. Style your store with colors and themes
Colors add life to boring stuff!
An attractive website design with a colorful event-inspired entry popup can attract more customers to your store.
The fortune wheel (Spin and Win) has several themes for different occasions like Black Friday, Christmas, New year, and many more.
The themes have several alluring features that change the look and feel colors, and design. Also, it can be scheduled for the occasion in advance.
You can always play with colors in your store. Add colorful banners, change the button colors and use different modules and addons to make it look more attractive.
3. Add decoration effects on store
The holiday season has feelings and emotions attached to it and people connect to brands with ‘heart & soul’ elements behind the façade. Adding holiday vibes to your website can give them a feeling of attachment.
You can add Christmas decoration effects, snow effects on the landing page or any of the other pages of the website with the Decoration Effect Module developed for the holiday season.
Decorate the eCommerce store by dropping colorful text, symbols from the admin settings, such as snowflakes, flowers, stars, etc.
Never miss a chance during the holiday season as this quarter brings a lot of opportunities in eCommerce.
4. Ideas to set up header and footer for holidays
Be it any festival or occasion, you can set images, GIFs on the header, and footer of your website pages. Like for Christmas, you can either add a x-mas tree, decoration elements with bows and bells to the header, and something more attractive to the footer.
The Website Decoration effect module has several templates or you can upload customized images to it. Also, random elements can be displayed on your website that will add more festivity to their appearance and design.
The holiday season gives you many opportunities, so why not take advantage and grab as many customers as you can?
5. Run Exciting Deals on PrestaShop Store
In the coming holiday season, combining an impactful landing page full of deals and discounts with tagging and content sharing can prove to be a very useful strategy. Sales, discounts, and deals are game-changers when it comes to online shopping. You can always show a promotional coupon bar on the footer of the landing page or other pages using the versatile Website Decoration effects module without hampering the website design.
And, the Spin and Win Module allows users to grab exciting deals when they through their luck on it. The fortune wheel displays discount coupons, codes, or text messages on the slices. It is completely configurable in an easy manner and is one of our best sellers. You even get more email subscribers by offering deals and discounts through the lucky wheel. This provides a delightful customer experience and improved the website design with its attractive look and feel.
Mix it up!
Both these modules have exceptional features and functionality that surely can add a lot to your website’s design and decoration section during the holiday season. You can add either one of these or both the modules on your store for running deals, adding effects and animations to your eCommerce store.
With-passing day, the holiday season is closing in rapidly. People are not going to settle for an unintuitive, obnoxious online store design with the zillion choices they have out there. This season, optimize your site for your customers and see the results coming in!
Every eCommerce store merchant waits for the holiday season because there is maximum participation of the online shoppers in the store during this time. Along with that holiday season records the highest sales in the entire year. It is time to prepare online store for holiday season.
Over the next few months, the online stores will be planning for a shopping marathon, and eCommerce traders need to get ready to meet the enormous demands that come with that. You need to do the eCommerce holiday planning, starting with effective marketing strategies, offering free shipping and easy returns, and a lot more to stand out from the competitors.
Optimizing the store for all these points is necessary to achieve holiday sales, nothing holds more importance than providing customers with a seamless and hassle-free shopping experience and increase customer retention.
Refer to an eCommerce Holiday Calendar for holiday readiness. As you know, the holiday season begins from Halloween and ends at the arrival of the New Year and you have to plan your marketing campaigns months before it begins.
ECommerce Holiday Season Statistics 2020
If we talk about global m-commerce stats, it has already surpassed eCommerce. The numbers speak about the importance of smooth site functionality on mobile devices.
Did you know m-commerce accounted for 35.8% of the total sales in the US in 2020, as per Statista? For the year 2020, the record sales according to Statista was 755.3 billion US dollars, which was 729.3 in the year 2019 and 701.2 billion dollars in 2018.
Customer Loyalty is a major concern for every business. From the previous year’s eCommerce holiday season data, only 12% of customers are continuing to stay loyal.
During the 4th quarter of 2020, Amazon generated total net sales of 125.56 billion U.S. dollars, surpassing 87.44 billion U.S. dollars in the same quarter of the previous year.
Adobe tweeted, online shoppers spent 4 billion U.S. dollars during 2020’s Cyber Week — a 20.7% increase YoY.
2020 was a delight to small businesses as 44% of people planned to spend on small businesses.
How to prepare your online business for the holidays?
For starters, add some holiday vibe to your online store. Use attractive banners with holiday offers, discounts along with the wishes to make it more engaging. Additionally, you can use eCommerce plugins that enhance customer engagement, brand awareness, customer retention and gives a flawless checkout experience.
Here is the list of 13 modules by KnowBand which can help you optimize your store this holiday season. This is the time to start preparing for a holiday rush to ensure a lucrative selling season.
Modules to increase customer engagement
In a dynamic eCommerce environment, stay ahead of trends and in line with the industry’s fresh and up-to-date trends. Use Spin and Win Popup and Exit Pop up for customer engagement.
1. Add exciting Spin and Win Popup
Increase customer engagement on your website by adding a Gamification element. Popup draws the attention of your customers towards the eye-catching spin-win wheel module and engages them in a fun activity.
Along with user engagement, this plugin can be a treat to your home page. It has several themes for every occasion and event, for example, Christmas, New Year, Halloween, and Cyber Monday themes for the holiday season. Visitors are asked to try their luck by spinning the wheel and grab some exciting offers. But, to complete the spin, a user needs to share their email address, which you can use for your eCommerce email marketing campaigns, and thus boost your conversions.
The module provides merchants with tons of customization ranging from designing the look of the popup to set up the time for the popup appearance. Click here to check out the Spin and Win fortune wheel module.
Available for:
PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, Magento 2, WooCommerce, and Shopify
2. Exit Pop-up
The next eCommerce Holiday planning idea is to add an Exit Popup in your digital commerce. It is not always used to show an offer. You can configure it as per your requirements based on what outcomes you want to achieve through it.
Exit popup appears when a customer leaves the browsing area or intends to exit the tab. You can make the pop-up as appealing as you can. Also, you can ask for feedback from your customers.
Using the exit pop-up module can reduce the bounce rate, increase customer engagement, and boosts conversions. During the holiday season, you can compel users to shop more from your eCommerce store by offering some exciting offers when they are about to leave.
All eCommerce stores look forward to repeating sales and to make it easier, Knowband has a range of plugins. Adding a Gift Card and Loyalty Point program will be a great holiday season idea.
3. Offer Loyalty Points
Encourage repeat purchases by rewarding your customers with loyalty points. Our Loyalty Points module ensures customer retention as well as customer acquisition. It lets you provide reward points to every new user who performs a sign-up on your store and triggers impulse buying, followed by more loyalty points on the successful purchases.
This marketing strategy converts visitors into potential buyers and makes them stick to your store in the long run. It also enhances brand loyalty to a great extent. You can set up some rules for users like offer loyalty points when customers share their feedback. It can also include offering loyalty points based on the total cart value, product quantity, product price, selected payment methods, etc.
These points can be used as a discount voucher on the checkout page. Click here to check out the Loyalty Point module.
Available for:
PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, and Magento 2 store
4. Gift the Product
Since you are setting up your store for the holiday season blast, you can attract visitors and upsell by giving gift products on a fixed amount of purchase.
There are some major advantages of giving gifts with purchase. It increases the average cart value, boosts conversion, and reduces the bounce rate on your store.
Gift the product is an amazing plugin and it can set your sales on fire. It is a sales strategy that attracts and converts the buyers. Refer to this blog that explains how you can use the Gift with Purchase campaign in B2C Marketing.
Available for:
PrestaShop and Opencart
Build Brand Awareness
5. Gift Card Module
While striking off the eCommerce holiday season checklist for customer retention and advance sales, consider selling personalized digital gift cards.
The Gift card module is a must-have plugin for holiday season sales, as it brings new customers to your store. Also, it saves your customer from sending awful gifts to their loved ones.
Other benefits of the Gift Card module are that it boosts brand awareness and makes digital gifting easy. Customers can send photo gift cards with custom messages.
Prestashop, Magento, and OpenCart eCommerce stores.
eCommerce Plugins to improve the shopping experience
When developing an eCommerce website, you have to make sure that the website is mobile responsive and keep users engaged for a while. Create a mobile app for your website or make the pages mobile responsive with the AMP module. You can also use the Progressive web app (PWA) plugin to make your digital commerce user-friendly.
6. Mobile App Builder
Mobile App Builder is not just a module for holiday season sales but it is for everyday user experience.
It lets you transform your eCommerce website into an Android and iOS Mobile App conveniently, without any requirement of coding or technical knowledge. The app will give a rich and user-friendly, experience to smartphone users.
Since users nowadays demand an app for an easy browsing experience, the Mobile App Builder module makes it the best fit to provide an amazing user experience.
The holiday season is coming close, now is the best time to introduce your mobile app and delight your users, and grab huge holiday sales.
Moreover, to achieve the best shopping experience, the Mobile App Builder offers easy customization, Social login, Fingerprint login, and OTP login. Also, it has WhatsApp live chat and Zopim Chat support. The real-time synchronization of the website into App is a bonus. Sell across the world with its multi-lingual support, multiple payment and shipping methods, etc.
We are currently running an exclusive offer for the PrestaShop website owners where they can get an additional 30% discount on the new purchase.
All you need to do is apply the coupon code “MOBI30” during the checkout.
Available for:
Prestashop, OpenCart, and Magento eCommerce stores
7. Reduce site load time with AMP
Our AMP module tackles the slow loading of your website on mobile devices and increases the page load speed to a great extent. When website traffic is at its peak in the holiday season, the website speed may get affected.
Thus, the AMP module, ensures that your mobile users do not find any troublesome experience with your website and are offered a faster and smoother loading.
Also, faster loading not only helps you reduce the bounce rate but also benefits in improved mobile rankings on the search engine.
Talking about its features, you can enable the AMP functionality for multiple pages on your website like the Home page, Category page, Product page, etc. You can also customize these pages as per your requirements.
A Progressive web app provides App like experience when a customer explores the website on a mobile browser. In the holiday season, eCommerce receives a lot of attention, and to keep your customers engaged, you have to provide a responsive interface. PWA makes the store more interactive and user-friendly.
Even with no internet, the website will display the products and loads the pages using saved caches. PWA is smooth, lightweight, and fast loading. Convert your website into a PWA with KnowBand’s Progressive web app builder without any coding knowledge.
A responsive website is engaging and has the potential to convert your visitors into customers and they will spend more time. Provide an awesome user experience to your customers when they visit your store for holiday shopping.
Being an eCommerce store owner, you must provide your customers with a hassle-free checkout experience this holiday season. Unlike the multi-step checkout process, it displays all the checkout elements on a single page and reduces the checkout friction.
To make the checkout path convenient for customers, our One Page Checkout offers Social Login, Guest Checkout, Inline Validation, Google Auto-address fill, and supports nearly all the payment methods and shipping services. A long and complicated checkout shackles the shopping experience which eventually results in cart abandonment.
The Prestashop One Page Checkout is our best seller extension. It has 10000+ downloads on the PrestaShop Addon store while 12000+ downloads on the KnowBand store.
Find the complete features and benefits of the One Page checkout module for the respective platforms:
The Abandoned Cart module helps you recover your lost sales by sending regular follow-up emails to the abandoned carters. With so many competitors, there are hundreds of choices available and many users leave the orders in their cart. While planning for the holiday season, prepare your store to track the user behavior for cart abandonment.
The module reminds users about incomplete purchases and converts them into customers by including exclusive offers in your emails and on a reminder pop-up.
You can send serial emails as reminders and if not sure how to write an abandoned cart email, refer to our guide.
The Abandoned Cart module can boost your conversions significantly.
Are you prepared for managing the order returns? Since the holiday season captures a huge number of orders, there will be returns for sure. Use a return manager to prepare online store for holiday Season. Our Return Manager module ensures that you do not lose out on customers due to a poor return process.
The Return Manager module helps you manage your eCommerce returns conveniently and enhances customer loyalty by making the return process way too easy for the customers.
The module provides 3 return choices to the customers in the form of Credits, Refund, and Replacement, and allows them to highlight the defect by uploading the image of the defective/damaged product. One interesting feature of the module is that the admin can create the return request on the customer’s behalf.
PrestaShop Booking and Rental system addon provides your customers with a hassle-free online booking experience and makes it a simple task for the merchants to manage their online bookings.
This PrestaShop addon offers an appointment booking facility, hotel booking facility, and rental booking facility. It lets you adjust your booking days and time slots as per the availability, and you can adjust the price for different days and timing. There is much more it offers for every booking type.
If you have a costume rental business then this Halloween, manage your orders with KnowBand’s Booking and Rental system plugin.
If you wish to transform your online booking PrestaShop website into a mobile app, you can look out for PrestaShop Booking and Rental Mobile App.
13. Product Customization
Consumers are increasingly demanding a customized shopping experience from their favorite brands. Delivering an amazing customer experience that can help you grow sales this Christmas season requires a strong customer data management system and personalization tools.
Personalization benefits have also made their way into the product experience. Customization allows online consumers to create more considerate gifts, which is a product feature that is projected to grow in popularity over time. It’s a brilliant and memorable method to please customers to have a pleasant interface that allows them to customize a product online.
Customers may choose the appropriate printing options for their items with KnowBand’s Product Customizer.
Available for:
Opencart and PrestaShop eCommerce store
14. Multi-vendor marketplace
Earn extra cash this holiday season and make money while you sleep. You can introduce your marketplace website and allow vendors to sell on it. A marketplace runs on various commission models like membership fees, commission model, and subscription plans, etc.
KnowBand’s multivendor marketplace provides major two revenue options. The store manager can create different membership plans. Also, they can charge a commission on products sold.
It has several facilities for the admin and seller of the marketplace. Convert your website into a multi-vendor marketplace like Amazon or ETSY. Whether you are a new or an experienced merchant, you can always look forward to expanding your services.
Available for:
PrestaShop, Magento, Magento 2, and OpenCart eCommerce
Modules to send stock alerts
15. Web Push Notifications
Notifications and stock alerts can drive your customer’s psychology and trigger impulse buying. This holiday season, notify your customers about the new arrivals, price drops, various product statuses, and abandoned cart details.
Knowband’s Web Push Notifications module lets merchants schedule the alerts for their users about product availability with push notifications. For each of them, the user can decide whether they want to receive updates regarding them.
Moreover, you can customize the welcome popup in the holiday season theme that shows the request message for notification approval.
Many customers visit multiple stores to compare product prices. and You can compel the Customer to Return to your Store with the Back in Stock Module. The Back-in-stock module allows the eCommerce store owners to inform the customers about the re-stocked products.
It sends a push notification or an email to registered customers about the product which is back in stock. The customers can opt to get notified when the product of their interest comes back in stock.
You can find the back in Stock Module for your Prestashop and Magento eCommerce store on our Knowband Shop.
The user can refer your store to his/her friends, family, relatives, etc. by sharing with them the affiliate link or the referral code. In addition, they can send it over email and also share the link on social media directly from their affiliate account.
You can assign the commission to the affiliate partner for every new signup via their referral and also provide incentives when the referred user places an order. The commission rate can be set under the configurations of the module. Check out
Wrap up: That’s it. Get your desired module before it gets too late to leave an impact on your holiday sales. One thing is for sure: The online commerce sales on holiday season 2021 will increase and if you don’t have an online presence for your business, you need to get started.
Plan out your goal, remain updated with trends, and use new technologies.
Here are some helpful resources to get you started:
What is the best way to start an online store?
The most effective eCommerce platforms
How to optimize the product page?
If you have to need eCommerce assistance, you can drop a mail to us at support@knowband.com
While shopping on eCommerce online stores, we sometimes come across interactive CTAs/gamified interfaces which excites us to interact & avail discounts. One such common interactive way is to offer Spin to win the wheel on the store. But, have you ever thought of expanding the same to mobile apps. Yes, that’s right. Spin wheel discount on the eCommerce mobile apps. When netizens spin such a wheel, they get anyone out of all the discounts mentioned on the wheel. For online shoppers, this is like a lottery for discounts that can excite them to shop more.
Mobile devices are the most commonly used gadgets across the globe and mobile applications have already proven to be the best platform for customers to shop online. A huge number of online shoppers use mobile applications, instead of websites, to shop online. Hence, introducing a gamified ‘Spin-n-Win’ thingy on the eCommerce Mobile app can benefit both customers and the store owners. ‘Spin-n-win’ helps with increased user engagement & user satisfaction.
1. The store admin can make any sort of customization to the ‘Spin-n-Win’ popup. Its look and feel & also its placement can hence be customized. They even get to decide where, when, and who to display the pop-up. The timer can also be set for the pop-up, its display frequency can be adjusted, etc.
2. The store owners can personalize the offers that would be displayed in each section of the wheel.
3. To catch the holiday spirit, many themes are also provided to choose from such as for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, etc.
Brief Introduction of Mobile App Builder extension:
The eCommerce mobile app builder by KnowBand is a no-code tool that automatically builds a customizable eCommerce Mobile app (Android &/or iOS apps). This extension is a no-code solution yet store admins can make many customizations on their mobile app using the simplified admin panel provided on the backend of this app builder extension. Some features of the eCommerce Mobile app builder include:
Home Screen Layout customization
Fully white-label App
Multi-lingual & Multi-Currency Support
Unlimited Push Notifications
Live Synchronization with website inventory
Quick social login and product sharing
WhatsApp chat and many others.
Recent New Updates
1. Add To Cart button on Home Screen & Category Screen: The users shopping via the eCommerce mobile app won’t need to navigate to the product screen just for adding it into the shopping bag. Instead, a quick tap on the “Add To Cart” button would do the job for you. This quick button is available for all product blocks on Home Screen & Category Screen.
2. Reviews & Ratings for Products: The users can rate any product or submit their valuable feedback about the product from the eCommerce mobile app. Also, the already submitted reviews from the website will be displayed on the app by means of real-time synchronization.
3. Related Products for cross-selling & up-selling: Improve cross-sell and up-sell for your store by showcasing the related products on the app. Offer suggested products to users and motivate them to buy more along with the usual purchase.
Plan For Upcoming 2020 Holiday Season:
The holiday season for 2020 is around the corner. Most eCommerce websites have already begun their preparations & promotional strategies to increase revenue. If you haven’t started yet, both the Spin win extension & Mobile App Builder extension combo pack can do the job without any sort of burden or hassle. This is much awaited time for store owners as they are looking forward to increased sales in the upcoming months of October, November & December. Trust me, the netizens are going to get crazy with online shopping for Halloween, Christmas, New Year, and other events.
Here are some snapshots to prove why these modules are a must-have:
Thanksgiving Day
Black Friday
Christmas Day
Happy New Year
So, waste no more time & get your eCommerce Mobile App ready with a spinning wheel. Drop us an email at support@knowband.com in case of any discussion.
