Five Tips for Brands to Make Holiday Shopping a Breeze
For many of our friends in marketing, the final quarter of the year is filled with excitement and nervousness as last-minute preparations for a busy shopping season are made.
Product teams have made “must-have” gifts, creative teams have built emotional connections with key audiences, and marketing teams have created hard-to-resist experiences leading millions of people to their virtual marketplace.
Are you ready for the rush?
In the last quarter of 2021, e-commerce sales in the U.S. topped $200B1 with no signs of slowing down this year. Companies are scrambling to launch holiday deals ahead of the competition, but too many sales are still being lost at checkout.
In fact, recent estimates show that online U.S. retailers are losing up to $136B in annual revenue as customers abandon carts. Why? Because checkout isn’t properly optimized.2
There’s nothing worse than losing a potential lifetime customer to a terrible checkout process.
As a digital marketing or commerce lead, it’s critical that your shopping experience isn’t slowing anyone down—even for a second. There’s nothing worse than losing a potential lifetime customer to a terrible checkout process.
Try purchasing items from your own site and judge the experience for yourself. If it’s not as enjoyable as you hoped, we’ve got solutions:
Suggest add-ons in the shopping cart
Batteries. Accessories. Adapters. Suggesting products in the cart that save time, facilitate usage, or otherwise enhance the buying experience is a smart way to boost secondary revenue opportunities. Knowing your products and services inside out gives you keen insight into improving the consumer’s overall experience. When recommendations are data-driven and truly add value, cross-selling can be a pivotal first step toward building customer loyalty.
Put shipping details on display
With supply chain and staffing challenges still brewing, knowing when a package will arrive and how much it will cost is a critical part of the decision-making process. Avoid saving this information until the very end, which can cause shoppers to drop the purchase. Instead, find ways to talk about the value you’re creating long before checkout. Share differentiators such as free two-day shipping for registered members, free returns, or free shipping with a minimum purchase, as examples.
Create a four-field checkout
As a rule, fewer steps bring greater revenue potential. If you’re asking shoppers to enter more than a name, address, email, and credit card, you’re likely losing sales. To make things even easier, insert a Google Maps connection. Your customer’s address will automatically display thanks to location-based targeting enabled from their browser.
Add an optical card reader
It’s challenging enough to find the perfect holiday gift. So, memorizing 16-digit credit card numbers is no one’s priority. Without an optical card reader, consumers making multiple purchases must look back and forth between their credit card and phone to confirm everything’s correct. Thanks to banking apps that have made this technology more common, customers are more likely to trust the process and enjoy the ease of use.
Open an express lane
We’ve all been stuck in a crowded checkout lane holding one or two items. Online shoppers feel similarly frustrated when asked to reenter payment info, especially if they’re used to speedy payment services like PayPal or Amazon Pay. Most of these solutions provide simple API connections to your website, enabling a fast, seamless checkout. These handy apps also serve as a digital address book to effortlessly ship gifts to family and friends.
So, how did your digital shopping experience shape up? If there’s room for improvement or you’re looking to elevate your process even further, Razorfish commerce experts are here to help. During the holiday, and all year long, we help clients unlock growth by connecting their purpose to business performance.
1 Source: Statista 2022
2 “online retailers in the US are losing $111–136 billion annually in revenue to cart abandonment due to a lack of checkout optimization. This estimate is based on total online retail sales of $993 billion in 2022”—Coresight Research
