Is your omnichannel system ready for the holidays?
Customers are multitasking now more than ever before. Whether they’re back in the office or working from home, online Christmas shopping is likely not the only tab open.
It's a crucial time for retailers to pay special attention to their omnichannel experience – from in store, to online or mobile. Retailers need to have a website that is easy to navigate and provides the same kind of information customers would receive in person. Creating an app is another valuable way to provide the same features as their website, but in a more immersive and accessible way.
While your business is gearing up for the holidays, we’re here to help. We’ve compiled a checklist for a before-Christmas audit to run on your omnichannel experience, so that you can ensure your system is ready for the holiday rush.
After all, the stakes are high. If your page doesn’t load, shoppers will move on. If your online inventory isn’t syncing with the warehouse, your customers are going to be some angry elves.
Your Before-Christmas Checklist:
Make sure that your inventory online and in store are synching correctly.
Test for worst-case scenarios. Not all shoppers will add to cart and check out. They may come back and forth to your site multiple times before checking out. Make sure that cookies and tags are linked correctly so that your customers get the experience you promise them.
Test the shopping experience as a guest and as someone who has a saved account.
Test the coupons and discounts that you’ll be running ahead of time. Work with marketing to get their campaigns and make sure that everything works the way you intend.
Conduct load testing internally and with external teams that are responsible for any systems that integrate into your platform. This will help your system be prepared for unexpected holiday traffic levels.
Install critical security updates well before the holiday season.
Communicate with your fulfillment team to ensure they have a staffing and capacity plan that matches your expected peak order levels.
Offer shipping options that give the customer an expected delivery date. ShipperHQ is a great way to implement this tool into your platform!
Double check your analytic systems so that you can collect valuable data and monitor conversation rates. This is useful for detecting customer experience problems and to implement future site improvements.
Omnichannel nightmare before Christmas
Rebel Athletic is a leading luxury cheer uniform brand, but their eCommerce platforms were struggling prior to partnering with Creatuity. They were juggling 5 WordPress multisite backends, and encountered site crashes during the holiday season because their platforms couldn’t handle the traffic.
After working with Creatuity to implement Adobe Commerce, they consolidated their 5 platforms into one desktop and mobile user-friendly site. Rebel saw a 350% increase in holiday sales and a 25% increase in mobile traffic year-over-year after working with Creatuity.
Most retail businesses do at least 70% of their sales during the holidays and we’d be willing to bet your business is in the same boat.
The last thing we want you to have is an omnichannel nightmare before Christmas. We’d prefer for you to have a White – or Green? – Christmas.
If you need help making your omnichannel list and checking it twice, give us a call. We’d be happy to help make sure that your holiday season is merry and bright.
