The beginning of 2020 seemed like the days were long and time was stretched out. The last few months as we approach the holiday season have been the complete opposite and have passed by in the blink of an eye. The last few months of the year are most likely going to continue to flash right by us. Making sure your business is prepared for the holiday season and holiday spending is going to be helpful if you do it all ahead of time.
With COVID cases continuing to rise and people wanting to gather for the holidays, you can expect your site traffic to increase as people are searching online for Christmas gifts more this year than ever. Rather than doing holiday shopping in-store, many people are going to be searching for and buying their gifts online. This especially includes the gun industry, as many popular types and brands of guns have been out of stock for months at the bigger stores, people will turn more to smaller online gun stores.
How can you make sure your online gun store is prepared for the holidays this year?
Always be on call for any customer service/website issues that may arise that need to be resolved in order to complete a sale.
You don’t want to lose a sale because your site visitors can’t find the product they’re looking for, or run into an error while trying to check out. Especially during the holidays, it’s important to monitor your email and phones for any customer questions or issues that pop up.
Make sure your site is optimized for user experience, all product images are of good quality, and the product descriptions are detailed.
What may seem like little things to some, can be deal-breakers for other buyers. Make sure your website has high-quality product images, showing all different angles of the guns and other products too. Your product pages should have detailed descriptions of any dimensions, brand information, features, materials made with, color options, etc. that may apply to your product. It’s helpful to think about the things that frustrate you when you’re shopping for firearms online and when a site doesn’t have all the specific information you’re looking for. For more design tips for online gun stores, check out our blog post.
Optimize your checkout page.
Gather a few members of your team to conduct tests to make sure your checkout page works well and is an easy process for consumers. If there are any parts of the checkout process that are confusing, frustrating, or missing, many consumers will not continue with that process. Make these changes and optimizations now, before the holiday season begins so that you can ensure everything is working properly after any updates or edits are made.
Offer free delivery.
Even if it’s just for a period of time (November-December), offering free delivery could mean more sales. People are more likely to purchase from a site, especially one that they have not previously purchased from, if there is free shipping or a coupon code for free shipping.
Create a sense of urgency.
While there already is a sense of urgency in holiday shopping because there’s a pretty definitive deadline to get the gifts, creating a sense of possibly missing out on a product or sale is a great way to get sales. Only run sales for a few days at a time, or introduce new products throughout the holiday season and tease them beforehand to create some excitement. For more tips on running promotions on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, check out our recent blog.
Show similar products or other recommended products on product pages.
Especially for products that have compatible pieces or accessories, adding similar products to the bottom of the product pages means that customers are able to easily add those to their cart if they’re interested. They may not have known that they were looking for those products either, but showing them that it’s an accessory to the product they searched for, is helpful and they’re more likely to purchase.
Have a system for product pages after a product sells out.
Setting up redirects when a product sells out will help get people to a category page with similar products on it. If a user gets to a 404 page or a ‘no results found’ page, that may frustrate them and they may leave the site and look for the product or brand of products somewhere else. Having redirects set up to direct them back to the category page can help them find something similar to what they initially wanted. You can also have them sign up for email alerts when the product is back in stock if you’re anticipating it coming back in stock.
Update your return and exchange policies where they may apply.
Now is a good time to review those policies to make sure they still align with your business goals. If they need any editing/changing, update them now, before the thick of the holiday season. It may also be a good idea to send an email to your previous customers to let them know that this information has changed.