The shop-till-you-drop season is upon us. While consumers are avoiding the long queues and heading online, small and mid-sized retailers are scrambling to prepare for the holiday rush. We get it, as a small business you’re worried about having enough inventory, your ability to quickly fulfill orders and how you’re going to maximise sales during the busiest time of year.

Over the next week we'll share our five top tips to help you optimise your Christmas marketing efforts and streamline your operations for ultimate profitability this Christmas period

1. Get your ecommerce website on the nice list.

Many businesses assume simply having a web presence is enough to attract and retain visitors and convert them to sales, but most websites don’t automatically make it onto Santa’s nice list. Ecommerce websites need to be optimised for search, performance and usability in order to reach and engage online consumers.  If Google and other search engines don’t know your website exists, you’re missing out on a valuable revenue source. And once people can find your site, you need to make sure you’re providing a great user experience to keep them there. According to research, 57% of consumers will abandon a website that fails to load after three seconds.

Go through this quick checklist to ensure your web efforts aren’t getting lost in the white noise of the worldwide web:

• Can Google and other search engines properly index and crawl your site?

• Is your site targeting the appropriate keyword for your target audience?

• Is your site optimised for mobile devices? (remember Google turned off search for non-mobile sites) 

• Is your site easy to navigate and search through?

• Are you leveraging images to engage visitors?

• Are your securing customer payment information?

• Is your site integrated with social media platforms?

We'll look at optimising your Social Selling in Part 2. 

Need a hand getting your ecommerce site optimised - contact us and discuss the best way to make Christmas 2015 your best selling season yet!