Ecommerce businesses gearing up for the holiday season must peek behind the curtain, check the rearview mirror and look ahead to steer clear of goblins and ghosts (re: bad user experience and poor website performance) lurking in the shadows. For those looking to make the most of this Halloween season and beyond, here are the top spooky things every retailer needs to avoid.
Haunted Website Performance
Are you prepped for holiday madness? With the increased traffic from holiday promotions and seasonal shopping, it’s important to ensure your website is prepared to handle the crowds, preventing slowdowns, crashes and other technical issues. Implement important features like fast-loading pages, caching, and content delivery networks (CDNs) to ensure a lag-free user experience. Utilizing image compression, minification of CSS and JavaScript files, and lazy loading to reduce page-load times is key to online shopper engagement. In fact, Google reports that the probability of someone bouncing off of a page increases by 32% as page-loading time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds.
It’s also critical to simplify website navigation, avoiding a house of mirrors situation filled with confusing menus and cluttered layouts that can lead to frustrated users giving up. A solid user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) leads customers through a journey to find what they need, and they also highlight holiday products front and center. Navigation panels that highlight page names and categories, as well as filters that allow users to customize which products they’re shown and in which order, are all important aspects of an easy-to-use website that keeps customers coming back for more.
Spine-Chilling Data
A data-driven approach doesn’t have to be spine-chilling. It starts with collecting good data. Tools like Google Analytics are easy-to-use and collect details like where people are physically located, the length of time they spend browsing a website, and average order values (AOV).
This kind of detailed information can be a starting point for establishing overall site merchandising strategy, determining the right product promotions for the target audience, and optimally aligning site features with users’ needs. Having access to this data in real time is crucial to updating strategies that factor in shopper needs.
This data can also fuel effective personalization, something modern shoppers consider key. Recommendation engines and algorithms can surface relevant items to shoppers, not only speeding up and streamlining their shopping experiences but also creating opportunities for sellers to increase average order value. Returning customers expect businesses to know their preferences and provide accurate, individualized experiences.
Nightmare on “No-Results” Street
Keyword searches alone can turn up the dreaded “no results” page. To make sure this doesn’t happen, consider applying an end-to-end AI search. This technology can truly read people’s minds; move aside fortune tellers.
So, what does this look like in practice? A dad of two searching for “spooky decor that won’t scare kids.” He is looking for fake cobwebs, giant skeletons, a plush, friendly vampire or perhaps Target’s sassy pumpkin ghoul – he just doesn’t know it yet. Luckily, AI does. While this may seem like a silly search query, it’s actually an example of a long tail search query, which is a query that mimics how humans think. These conversational queries can comprise up to 55% of all search queries. When retailers fail to understand the intent behind their customers’ searches, they can end up losing billions of dollars in revenue. Terrifying!
Scary Masks and Confusion
While the Halloween season is filled with frights and eerie fog-filled nights, you want your website to be bright, clear and easy to navigate. For example, unclear shipping and return policies can turn even the most loyal shopper into a werewolf. To avoid this, clearly communicate shipping times, costs and return policies from the get-go to set customer expectations and prevent dissatisfaction.
Similarly, misleading product descriptions or images should be avoided. Providing accurate and clear product descriptions and images prevents disappointments upon receipt of products that don’t match expectations. In addition, avoid overwhelming customers with excessive pop-ups or ads that hinder their shopping experience and distract from their primary objective. People like to be surprised by a scary movie, not an annoying pop-up.
Coffin Snooze
Make your website a thriller, not a snooze. At the end of the day, your website is the shop window on your storefront. Design your website to be well optimized with a modern user interface that features colorful design, uncluttered layout, user-focused copy, professional product images, a prominently placed search bar, attractively presented promotional content and a mobile-friendly display. A customer on a great website is like a vampire at a blood bank.
These frightening mistakes can be easy to make as other worries and priorities take center stage, but the truth is – an ecommerce experience can make or break a sale. By focusing on the end user this holiday season through a user-friendly, secure, and customer-centric shopping experience, retailers can maximize their success and make the most of the spooky season.
