Every eCommerce store merchant waits for the holiday season because there is maximum participation of the online shoppers in the store during this time. Along with that holiday season records the highest sales in the entire year. It is time to prepare online store for holiday season.
Over the next few months, the online stores will be planning for a shopping marathon, and eCommerce traders need to get ready to meet the enormous demands that come with that. You need to do the eCommerce holiday planning, starting with effective marketing strategies, offering free shipping and easy returns, and a lot more to stand out from the competitors.
Optimizing the store for all these points is necessary to achieve holiday sales, nothing holds more importance than providing customers with a seamless and hassle-free shopping experience and increase customer retention.
Refer to an eCommerce Holiday Calendar for holiday readiness. As you know, the holiday season begins from Halloween and ends at the arrival of the New Year and you have to plan your marketing campaigns months before it begins.
ECommerce Holiday Season Statistics 2020
If we talk about global m-commerce stats, it has already surpassed eCommerce. The numbers speak about the importance of smooth site functionality on mobile devices.
- Did you know m-commerce accounted for 35.8% of the total sales in the US in 2020, as per Statista? For the year 2020, the record sales according to Statista was 755.3 billion US dollars, which was 729.3 in the year 2019 and 701.2 billion dollars in 2018.
- Customer Loyalty is a major concern for every business. From the previous year’s eCommerce holiday season data, only 12% of customers are continuing to stay loyal.
- During the 4th quarter of 2020, Amazon generated total net sales of 125.56 billion U.S. dollars, surpassing 87.44 billion U.S. dollars in the same quarter of the previous year.
- Adobe tweeted, online shoppers spent 4 billion U.S. dollars during 2020’s Cyber Week — a 20.7% increase YoY.
- 2020 was a delight to small businesses as 44% of people planned to spend on small businesses.
How to prepare your online business for the holidays?
For starters, add some holiday vibe to your online store. Use attractive banners with holiday offers, discounts along with the wishes to make it more engaging. Additionally, you can use eCommerce plugins that enhance customer engagement, brand awareness, customer retention and gives a flawless checkout experience.
Here is the list of 13 modules by KnowBand which can help you optimize your store this holiday season. This is the time to start preparing for a holiday rush to ensure a lucrative selling season.
Modules to increase customer engagement
In a dynamic eCommerce environment, stay ahead of trends and in line with the industry’s fresh and up-to-date trends. Use Spin and Win Popup and Exit Pop up for customer engagement.
1. Add exciting Spin and Win Popup
Increase customer engagement on your website by adding a Gamification element. Popup draws the attention of your customers towards the eye-catching spin-win wheel module and engages them in a fun activity.
Along with user engagement, this plugin can be a treat to your home page. It has several themes for every occasion and event, for example, Christmas, New Year, Halloween, and Cyber Monday themes for the holiday season. Visitors are asked to try their luck by spinning the wheel and grab some exciting offers. But, to complete the spin, a user needs to share their email address, which you can use for your eCommerce email marketing campaigns, and thus boost your conversions.
The module provides merchants with tons of customization ranging from designing the look of the popup to set up the time for the popup appearance. Click here to check out the Spin and Win fortune wheel module.
Available for:
PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, Magento 2, WooCommerce, and Shopify
2. Exit Pop-up
The next eCommerce Holiday planning idea is to add an Exit Popup in your digital commerce. It is not always used to show an offer. You can configure it as per your requirements based on what outcomes you want to achieve through it.
Exit popup appears when a customer leaves the browsing area or intends to exit the tab. You can make the pop-up as appealing as you can. Also, you can ask for feedback from your customers.
Using the exit pop-up module can reduce the bounce rate, increase customer engagement, and boosts conversions. During the holiday season, you can compel users to shop more from your eCommerce store by offering some exciting offers when they are about to leave.
Knowband provides an exit pop-up module.
Available for:
Prestashop, Magento, and OpenCart store
Prepare For Customer Retention
All eCommerce stores look forward to repeating sales and to make it easier, Knowband has a range of plugins. Adding a Gift Card and Loyalty Point program will be a great holiday season idea.
3. Offer Loyalty Points
Encourage repeat purchases by rewarding your customers with loyalty points. Our Loyalty Points module ensures customer retention as well as customer acquisition. It lets you provide reward points to every new user who performs a sign-up on your store and triggers impulse buying, followed by more loyalty points on the successful purchases.
This marketing strategy converts visitors into potential buyers and makes them stick to your store in the long run. It also enhances brand loyalty to a great extent. You can set up some rules for users like offer loyalty points when customers share their feedback. It can also include offering loyalty points based on the total cart value, product quantity, product price, selected payment methods, etc.
These points can be used as a discount voucher on the checkout page. Click here to check out the Loyalty Point module.
Available for:
PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, and Magento 2 store
4. Gift the Product
Since you are setting up your store for the holiday season blast, you can attract visitors and upsell by giving gift products on a fixed amount of purchase.
There are some major advantages of giving gifts with purchase. It increases the average cart value, boosts conversion, and reduces the bounce rate on your store.
Gift the product is an amazing plugin and it can set your sales on fire. It is a sales strategy that attracts and converts the buyers. Refer to this blog that explains how you can use the Gift with Purchase campaign in B2C Marketing.
Available for:
PrestaShop and Opencart
Build Brand Awareness
5. Gift Card Module
While striking off the eCommerce holiday season checklist for customer retention and advance sales, consider selling personalized digital gift cards.
The Gift card module is a must-have plugin for holiday season sales, as it brings new customers to your store. Also, it saves your customer from sending awful gifts to their loved ones.
Other benefits of the Gift Card module are that it boosts brand awareness and makes digital gifting easy. Customers can send photo gift cards with custom messages.
Explore Knowband Gift card Manager extension.
Available for:
Prestashop, Magento, and OpenCart eCommerce stores.
eCommerce Plugins to improve the shopping experience
When developing an eCommerce website, you have to make sure that the website is mobile responsive and keep users engaged for a while. Create a mobile app for your website or make the pages mobile responsive with the AMP module. You can also use the Progressive web app (PWA) plugin to make your digital commerce user-friendly.
6. Mobile App Builder
Mobile App Builder is not just a module for holiday season sales but it is for everyday user experience.
It lets you transform your eCommerce website into an Android and iOS Mobile App conveniently, without any requirement of coding or technical knowledge. The app will give a rich and user-friendly, experience to smartphone users.
Since users nowadays demand an app for an easy browsing experience, the Mobile App Builder module makes it the best fit to provide an amazing user experience.
The holiday season is coming close, now is the best time to introduce your mobile app and delight your users, and grab huge holiday sales.
Moreover, to achieve the best shopping experience, the Mobile App Builder offers easy customization, Social login, Fingerprint login, and OTP login. Also, it has WhatsApp live chat and Zopim Chat support. The real-time synchronization of the website into App is a bonus. Sell across the world with its multi-lingual support, multiple payment and shipping methods, etc.
Check out here.
We are currently running an exclusive offer for the PrestaShop website owners where they can get an additional 30% discount on the new purchase.
All you need to do is apply the coupon code “MOBI30” during the checkout.
Available for:
Prestashop, OpenCart, and Magento eCommerce stores
7. Reduce site load time with AMP
Our AMP module tackles the slow loading of your website on mobile devices and increases the page load speed to a great extent. When website traffic is at its peak in the holiday season, the website speed may get affected.
Thus, the AMP module, ensures that your mobile users do not find any troublesome experience with your website and are offered a faster and smoother loading.
Also, faster loading not only helps you reduce the bounce rate but also benefits in improved mobile rankings on the search engine.
Talking about its features, you can enable the AMP functionality for multiple pages on your website like the Home page, Category page, Product page, etc. You can also customize these pages as per your requirements.
Available for:
8. Choose PWA over Native
A Progressive web app provides App like experience when a customer explores the website on a mobile browser. In the holiday season, eCommerce receives a lot of attention, and to keep your customers engaged, you have to provide a responsive interface. PWA makes the store more interactive and user-friendly.
Even with no internet, the website will display the products and loads the pages using saved caches. PWA is smooth, lightweight, and fast loading. Convert your website into a PWA with KnowBand’s Progressive web app builder without any coding knowledge.
A responsive website is engaging and has the potential to convert your visitors into customers and they will spend more time. Provide an awesome user experience to your customers when they visit your store for holiday shopping.
Available for:
PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento 2, WooCommerce
Recommended Reads:
- Why is it Important to attract Potential Customers?
- Best extensions to boost Holiday sales
- Uplift Holiday Season Sale by Persuasive Marketing
For flawless Checkout experience
9. One Page Checkout
Being an eCommerce store owner, you must provide your customers with a hassle-free checkout experience this holiday season. Unlike the multi-step checkout process, it displays all the checkout elements on a single page and reduces the checkout friction.
To make the checkout path convenient for customers, our One Page Checkout offers Social Login, Guest Checkout, Inline Validation, Google Auto-address fill, and supports nearly all the payment methods and shipping services. A long and complicated checkout shackles the shopping experience which eventually results in cart abandonment.
The Prestashop One Page Checkout is our best seller extension. It has 10000+ downloads on the PrestaShop Addon store while 12000+ downloads on the KnowBand store.
Find the complete features and benefits of the One Page checkout module for the respective platforms:
Marketing technique for abandoned cart recovery
10. Abandoned Cart
The Abandoned Cart module helps you recover your lost sales by sending regular follow-up emails to the abandoned carters. With so many competitors, there are hundreds of choices available and many users leave the orders in their cart. While planning for the holiday season, prepare your store to track the user behavior for cart abandonment.
The module reminds users about incomplete purchases and converts them into customers by including exclusive offers in your emails and on a reminder pop-up.
You can send serial emails as reminders and if not sure how to write an abandoned cart email, refer to our guide.
The Abandoned Cart module can boost your conversions significantly.
Available for:
PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, and Magento 2 Abandoned Cart Addons
Module To improve customer loyalty
11. Return Manager
Are you prepared for managing the order returns? Since the holiday season captures a huge number of orders, there will be returns for sure. Use a return manager to prepare online store for holiday Season. Our Return Manager module ensures that you do not lose out on customers due to a poor return process.
The Return Manager module helps you manage your eCommerce returns conveniently and enhances customer loyalty by making the return process way too easy for the customers.
The module provides 3 return choices to the customers in the form of Credits, Refund, and Replacement, and allows them to highlight the defect by uploading the image of the defective/damaged product. One interesting feature of the module is that the admin can create the return request on the customer’s behalf.
Available for:
PrestaShop, Magento, and Magento 2
Extend Your Business Reach
12. Booking and Rental system for PrestaShop
PrestaShop Booking and Rental system addon provides your customers with a hassle-free online booking experience and makes it a simple task for the merchants to manage their online bookings.
This PrestaShop addon offers an appointment booking facility, hotel booking facility, and rental booking facility. It lets you adjust your booking days and time slots as per the availability, and you can adjust the price for different days and timing. There is much more it offers for every booking type.
If you have a costume rental business then this Halloween, manage your orders with KnowBand’s Booking and Rental system plugin.
Check out the OpenCart and PrestaShop Booking and Rental System addon to know the complete features and benefits.
If you wish to transform your online booking PrestaShop website into a mobile app, you can look out for PrestaShop Booking and Rental Mobile App.
13. Product Customization
Personalization benefits have also made their way into the product experience. Customization allows online consumers to create more considerate gifts, which is a product feature that is projected to grow in popularity over time. It’s a brilliant and memorable method to please customers to have a pleasant interface that allows them to customize a product online.
Customers may choose the appropriate printing options for their items with KnowBand’s Product Customizer.
Available for:
Opencart and PrestaShop eCommerce store
14. Multi-vendor marketplace
Earn extra cash this holiday season and make money while you sleep. You can introduce your marketplace website and allow vendors to sell on it. A marketplace runs on various commission models like membership fees, commission model, and subscription plans, etc.
KnowBand’s multivendor marketplace provides major two revenue options. The store manager can create different membership plans. Also, they can charge a commission on products sold.
It has several facilities for the admin and seller of the marketplace. Convert your website into a multi-vendor marketplace like Amazon or ETSY. Whether you are a new or an experienced merchant, you can always look forward to expanding your services.
Available for:
PrestaShop, Magento, Magento 2, and OpenCart eCommerce
Modules to send stock alerts
15. Web Push Notifications
Notifications and stock alerts can drive your customer’s psychology and trigger impulse buying. This holiday season, notify your customers about the new arrivals, price drops, various product statuses, and abandoned cart details.
Knowband’s Web Push Notifications module lets merchants schedule the alerts for their users about product availability with push notifications. For each of them, the user can decide whether they want to receive updates regarding them.
Moreover, you can customize the welcome popup in the holiday season theme that shows the request message for notification approval.
Available for:
PrestaShop Web Push Notifications
Magento Web Push Notifications
Magento 2 Web Push Notifications
16. Back in Stock Alert module
Many customers visit multiple stores to compare product prices. and You can compel the Customer to Return to your Store with the Back in Stock Module. The Back-in-stock module allows the eCommerce store owners to inform the customers about the re-stocked products.
It sends a push notification or an email to registered customers about the product which is back in stock. The customers can opt to get notified when the product of their interest comes back in stock.
You can find the back in Stock Module for your Prestashop and Magento eCommerce store on our Knowband Shop.
Available for:
PrestaShop, OpenCart and Magento
For Customer Acquisition
17. The Affiliate and Referral Marketing
The Affiliate and Referral Program module allows users to register as an Affiliate partner on your store and earn commissions for every successful referral. Affiliate and referral marketing is a sneaky way to earn passive income.
The user can refer your store to his/her friends, family, relatives, etc. by sharing with them the affiliate link or the referral code. In addition, they can send it over email and also share the link on social media directly from their affiliate account.
You can assign the commission to the affiliate partner for every new signup via their referral and also provide incentives when the referred user places an order. The commission rate can be set under the configurations of the module. Check out
Available for:
PrestaShop Affiliate and Referral Program
Magento Affiliate and Referral Program
Magento 2 Affiliate and Referral Program
Wrap up: That’s it. Get your desired module before it gets too late to leave an impact on your holiday sales. One thing is for sure: The online commerce sales on holiday season 2021 will increase and if you don’t have an online presence for your business, you need to get started.
Plan out your goal, remain updated with trends, and use new technologies.
Here are some helpful resources to get you started:
What is the best way to start an online store?
The most effective eCommerce platforms
How to optimize the product page?
If you have to need eCommerce assistance, you can drop a mail to us at support@knowband.com