Holiday Preperation for E-commerce StoresWith the holiday season just around the corner, there are certain things you can do as an e-commerce website owner to ensure your site is secure and prepared for the holiday season rush.nnOne of the biggest things to consider is the increased amount of traffic you’re bound to receive. Talk to your Web host about how you can increase your server performance during the holiday rush. And, although this may seem obvious, check up on your domain name, Web hosting and merchant accounts to ensure that they’re not going to expire during the Christmas rush.nnAnother useful tip is to consider working with a website monitoring service. Odds are your website will go down at least once during the holiday season and if you’re not a big enough company to have a 24-hour IT department monitoring your server, sign up for a website monitoring service like Alertsite (alertsite.com) that will email or text message you if your site goes down at any point.nnYou should also optimize all areas of your site to ensure a smooth purchase process for holiday shoppers. You can scan your site for errors with Unica’s NetTracker (netinsight.unica.com/products/NetTracker.cfm) that lets you analyze Web logs and run a variety of analysis reports for a specified date range to identify broken links, slow loading pages, broken image paths and other issues.nnYou should also analyze call center problem reports in the pre-season to see what the top problems and questions are and fix them. You’ll likely find that some calls are due to poor website usability, missing information on specific pages or poor confirmation emails. It doesn’t hurt to update your FAQ section either with answers to common questions that arise during the season.nnE-commerce store owners should also analyze their returns and see why people have returned their purchases. In most cases, it’s because of poor or misleading product descriptions. Identify the main reasons and improve your product pages accordingly, which will not only save you a bundle on returns processing, but you’ll increase sales by retaining people who would otherwise leave because of unclear product descriptions.nnAnd of course, there’s the issue of security during the holiday season. With the increase in customer traffic, it’s likely there will be an increase in fraudulent transactions, so Internet merchants need to ensure they have adequate fraud and theft detection processes in place, like credit card verification methods to make certain that the person entering the card number actually has the card in possession. Also make sure that your site is secure by signing up with an SSL certificate provider like Comodo (comodo.com) or VeriSign (verisign.com) so that customers know your site is safe to perform transactions on.nnThere are other little things you can do to simply increase stickiness and sales to your site like optimizing your SEO and PPC campaigns for seasonal keywords, offering free gift wrapping, gift receipts for purchases, prominently displaying return policies and shipping cut-off dates, providing gift certificate options and a popular thing, if you can afford it, is to offer free shipping.
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