US digital sales to reach $7 billion on Thanksgiving.
— Salesforce Resource
Are you waiting for Thanksgiving to optimize your eCommerce site for traffic surges? Real market scenarios reveal that retailers need to be ready at all times to sustain eCommerce growth. With regular sale events and significant promotions throughout the year, eCommerce sites have risen to meet customer expectations. We learned from last year’s retail market experience that we need to be ready for peak demand anytime — not just during the holidays. We are expecting to see traffic surges as shoppers start earlier and continue into the new year.
Here’s what you can do to handle year-round peak eCommerce website performance levels.
Optimize website loading time
If a website takes a longer time to load, consider that maximum consumers will abandon that page. Unnecessary data and code will consume memory, trigger errors, slow page load times, and ultimately take a financial toll. Clean up data sets and relinquish unused data on a regular schedule to streamline your eCommerce website performance.
Steps to start optimizing website performance:
- Continuously refine your model.
- Use load testing and application performance testing
- Monitor site metrics to establish a baseline calculation.
- Measure runtimes across your website and resolve bottlenecks when necessary.
- Optimize caching to ensure popular pages are being stored.
- Implement timeout functions.
Maximize overall eCommerce website performance
Providing a stellar experience to your online shoppers so that they can quickly complete purchases is more important than the brand itself. Before adding other features that aren’t key revenue drivers, make certain basic functionalities of the website are working flawlessly. It is safe to run a test drive before you make all your website features live.
To avoid all the hassles of commerce functionalities, you can adopt headless commerce architecture. You can launch, update, and optimize eCommerce applications instantly as Headless commerce separates the back-end from the front-end of your storefront. There is no need to wait in the developer queue to add new functionalities now, like buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS).
Also Read: BOPIS – Buy Online Pick Up In-Store
58% of consumers expect to do more online shopping after the pandemic than before.
— “State of the Connected Customer”. Salesforce, October 2020
Prioritize personalization by enabling AI
With AI, retailers can customize the website according to individual shopper preferences. Let see what changes you can bring with AI implementation:
- Based on behavior data, customize product search results
- Add features like product recommendations, complete-the-set options to drive higher revenue
- Introduce AI-powered chatbots to handle common customer service requests
- Speed up standard processes during peak demand
- Empowering shoppers by automating workflows in customer portals
Also Read: 3D and AR Revolutionizing eCommerce Industry
Embrace a growth mindset
After every event, evaluate eCommerce website performance and customer feedback to embrace an attitude of continuous improvement. To support changing customers’ preferences and build loyalty, use those inputs to iterate your eCommerce strategy. You can continue to refine your site experience by gathering this data and incorporating feedback.
Final Thought
Companies will also face unique opportunities related to solid holiday demand and omnichannel shopping preferences in this holiday shopping season. However, they may pose many supply-chain issues and labor challenges to hold onto their customers.
Reach ETG Digital eCommerce experts to handle all hassle for you!
About ETG Digital
ETG is a Crest Level Salesforce Partner headquartered in Plano, Texas. We are ISO 9001:2015 certified company with a global delivery center in Hyderabad, India. We have dedicated teams of professionals spanning continents located in US, Canada, UAE, UK, Australia and India. Our ability to maintain talent hubs in multiple locations and working on projects for clients from various domains gives us a very unique advantage. An advantage to leverage proven technologies like Salesforce Commerce, Sales, Service, Partner and Marketing Clouds and using them to deliver tailor made solutions for clients to suit their business requirements.
If you are looking to take your business into the next league, you are at the right place. Connect with us at info@etg.digital or call us at +1 469 666 1119
