The huge flow of users who surf on the web looking for the perfect present became peak loads on e-commerces, that often are not planned in the right way by the e-shop managers, with the result of sudden website downs and ruinous consequences about money and brand image for the retailer.
So now this is what you have to ask yourself: is your website ready to face numerous pre-Christmas visits? Let’s see together the strategy to make your e-commerce at Christmas-proof and avoid the loss of money and clients!
In this respect, there are some features to keep in mind to prepare an e-commerce for the feast days: performance, security and scalability. Functions very important in themselves, they became more important during the peaks of online visits in the days before Christmas. A special care goes to the customer experience as a whole and to the promotion of discounts and dedicated offers. But today we want to focus mainly on technical aspects to be considered to increase online sales during the Christmas period.
– Performance
First of all, it is good to take care about the website performance to avoid shopping cart abandonment: this means being careful about the speed of the page loading. According to a recent research, one in two consumers expected a page loading under 3 seconds, so, if your site is too slow, there’s a high probability that users will click on the “back” button and they will visit a competitor website: therefore you have to be very careful about your e-commerce speed and reactivity!
– Security
Another relevant point is about security: a study by Jason Miller, Chief Strategist of Akamai e-commerce, shows a huge raise of cyber attacks to the online platforms compared to the previous years. To make consumers feel safe, security procedures have to be put on your website to protect both users and retailers from any possible attack.
And at the end, maybe the most important variable: the scalability.
– Scalability
As said at the beginning of this post, peak loads are dangerous if a website is not equipped to similar traffic volumes. This can generate downs of the platform, meaning loss of money and clients. To avoid it, it’s possible to make some test about loads, to check how the website reacts to the peaks of traffic, on different devices and network conditions. But above all, it’s important to verify if the hosting provider has the resources needed: for this reason, scalability is a crucial feature in the choice of the right provider, because if the systems used are not scalable, for the retailer could be very difficult to face a heavy load.
Once you’ve checked these elements, your e-commerce can be considered at Christmas-proof by the technological perspective! 😉
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