It’s never too soon to start planning for Cyber Monday and Black Friday, especially if you’re an eCommerce business. Throughout the entire year, these two shopping days are the most important ones to look out for when it comes to driving website traffic and increasing sales. For example, on Cyber Monday 2020, shoppers spent 15.1% more than last year. This day set the record for the largest U.S. online shopping day ever. Overall, holiday shoppers spent $10.8 billion.
Both Cyber Monday and Black Friday Benefit eCommerce Businesses
Although Cyber Monday is an extremely important day to drive sales, businesses see a larger increase in web traffic, conversions, and conversion rates on Black Friday. Cyber Monday is meant for online shopping, but many shoppers choose to shop online on Black Friday, too. In 2020, 103 million shoppers went online, versus 102 million in-store.
Both holidays are vital for eCommerce businesses. In this article we’ll be going over the steps you should take to make sure your eCommerce business benefits from the increase of online shoppers on both Cyber Monday and Black Friday.
1. Is your site optimized for speed?
There’s a reason site speed is essential for optimal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings. Consumers are impatient and expecting sites to load quickly. If your eCommerce website is too slow, 90% of customers will leave.
Site speed should always be taken into consideration to improve your SEO (so consumers can even find your site), but it’s even more important when you’re expecting an increase in website traffic.
Fortunately, there are a variety of ways you can speed up your eCommerce website. For example, all your images should be optimized to increase speed, which can be done by resizing them, saving them as JPEG files, or compressing them.
You can also use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Jetpack, implement lazy loading, speed up videos, reduce plugins, add caching, and upgrade your site.
2. Is your site mobile-friendly?
Having an eCommerce website that works on all devices, especially mobile, is vital to increase conversions and sales. On Black Friday in 2020, shopping on smartphones made up 40% of total online spending, while on Cyber Monday in 2020, mobile shoppers accounted for 37% of shoppers.
Ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly benefits you during the holiday seasons, but it also helps to improve your SEO year-round since Google penalizes websites that don’t offer a good user experience on mobile devices.
It may be surprising to learn that many small businesses aren’t optimized for mobile, and you definitely don’t want your company to be part of that group. If you’re not sure how your website performs on devices, you can use Google’s tool for free to test your mobile optimization. Simply enter your website URL and select Run Test.
If your website is mobile-friendly, you’ll see a green message saying, “Page is mobile-friendly.”
If it’s not optimized for mobile, you’ll see a red message saying, “Page is not mobile-friendly.” You’ll also get a few reasons and explanations as to why your site is not mobile-friendly. For example, it might notify you that the text used on your site is too small.
Depending on your current website, optimizing for mobile devices may mean small tweaks or huge website redesigns. You can also enable accelerated Google’s Mobile Pages (AMP).
3. Is your site organized?
As we stated above, consumers are impatient. They don’t want to wait a long time for a page to load, and they don’t want to have to scroll through pages and pages of merchandise to find the one thing they’re looking for. If they want to buy a black women’s blazer, they want it to be quickly and readily available to them. If it’s not, they’re going to go to another site where it is.
As an eCommerce business, your shoppers want an organized and neat online shopping experience. Just as you would organize a physical store, make it easy for your consumers to find the items they’re looking for when they’re browsing your website.
You can achieve eCommerce organization by placing a search bar in your navigation or adding a sidebar widget to your shop page with category navigation. You may also choose to do both because different shoppers may prefer different methods to search your online store.
As for category navigation, you can organize your products by price, women versus men, color, type of product, and sizing.
Don’t expect your shoppers to put forth the effort to search through all your products. Make it as easy and fast as possible for them to find whatever they’re looking for. If you don’t, they may go to another website that’s easier to search.
4. Is your checkout process simple
Shoppers want a fast and easy buying experience. This goes for website speed and organization but also for checking out. Having an easy checkout process is essential, because if shoppers get frustrated, you may miss out on conversions even when they had every intention to buy.
Ensure your checkout process is simple, easy, and intuitive, with minimal distractions. Make sure your checkout screen is mobile-friendly as well. Do everything you can to set up a checkout process that encourages shoppers to complete their orders.
For example, you can reduce visual clutter, minimize checkout fields, offer multiple payment options, allow guest checkout or single sign-on (SSO), provide shipping options, implement a one-page checkout, and provide a secure checkout experience.
To improve the buyer checkout experience, you should also ensure that your Black Friday and Cyber Monday discounts apply automatically. During these shopping holidays, consumers don’t expect to have to search for a discount code.
The average rate of abandoned online shopping carts is 70%, with eCommerce brands losing $18 billion worth of sales due to abandoned shopping carts. Ensure you don’t lose your conversions during the final step: the checkout.
Put Forth the Effort for Year-long Success
These tips may seem like a lot of work to prepare for two holidays. But if the $10.8 billion spent on Cyber Monday in 2020 combined with the $9 billion spent on the web on Black Friday in 2020 statistics don’t convince you, these tips will help your website succeed year-round as well.
These tips all help improve the consumer experience on your website, which improves your SEO ranking. If you take the time to prepare for Cyber Monday and Black Friday, you will see the benefits of your work throughout the entire year.
Plus, if you continuously ensure your website is up to speed, mobile-friendly, and organized with an excellent checkout experience, you’ll be all set to face next year’s Cyber Monday and Black Friday season with less effort needed to prepare.
As an eCommerce business, your website is the single most important aspect of your organization. If your website doesn’t offer a great customer experience, your buyers will never get to see how amazing your products truly are. Make 2021 the year you prepare for the holiday rush!