7 Tips To Successfully Revamp Your eCommerce Website For The Holiday Season

Long-awaited time of the year — Christmas cheer is around the corner!

Undoubtedly, the most colorful time of the year.

It's time to hang a wreath at your front door and take out those old Christmas decorations from the attic.

Speaking of tinsel and trinkets, whenever a customer walks into a store during the holiday season, their face lights up with Christmas joy, stunning tree decorations… sales, discounts, and special holiday offers. All welcome the Christmas spirit with open arms.

Houses and malls are not the only places that need fairy light decorations, your eCommerce store also needs some garlands and nutcrackers.

Even though the Pandemic has affected the physical Christmas shopping experience, still, physical retail isn’t over. But the intensity to which people shop online is higher than in-store shopping post-pandemic.

Therefore, online stores should prepare to give the best experience with stunning Christmas-themed landing pages and festive designs.

No exaggeration but the holiday season is actually an online shopping season. Every year families visit their favorite stores to buy Christmas presents, this year might be a little different. How? Because now online stores have become an ideal destination for gift shopping. In 2024, over 2.14 billion people worldwide are expected to buy online, up from 1.66 billion global digital buyers in 2016. Exciting!

Therefore — to all eCommerce stores - put in some effort and glitter your digital stores to welcome those crazy shoppers!

In this blog, I will share some genuinely amazing ideas about how you can transform and optimize your eCommerce website for the Holiday season to enhance the customer experience.

So, ho ho ho, let’s take a peek.

Whether you want to develop an eCommerce store or need well-researched insights on the eCommerce industry, For this, check out our informative articles on eCommerce

• Tweak your Web Design to Give it a Nice Christmas-y Touch

During the holiday season, don’t be scared to modify your eCommerce web design according to the Christmas theme. Make it look more attractive for potential customers to visit and make a purchase.

The world becomes brighter around Christmas and so should your online platform and when it comes to choosing gifts, your eCommerce web solution should stand out.

Another thing you can do to optimize the eCommerce website for the Holiday season is to change font styles and colors, and add elements such as jingle bells, Santa hats, gifts, snowflakes, etc. to match the festive atmosphere. Offer special holiday collections and detailed product catalogs to boost the shopping experience.

Few things you can do with your website:

• Newsletter subscription popup, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy new year
• You can add animations of Santa Claus on a sleigh with Dascher
• Change the color palette according to the theme — the redder the better
• Rearrange your product catalog — popular items around Christmas should be on the top

To make things easier, you can find free Christmas website templates on Shopify, ThemeForest, etc.

Recommended: How to build eCommerce websites in 10 simple steps?

• Add Festivity To Your Product Images

Product images are the most important part of your eCommerce development. Here brick and mortar stores have more advantages over your online store since people can touch and feel items. They can observe every little detail. Whereas, adding an emotional feel to the products can be very challenging for online sellers.

Your products should be able to recreate that feeling people feel in physical stores. However, choosing just the right type of visuals can fill the gap and create in-person shopping experiences through eCommerce platforms. To connect with customers, upload Christmas-themed product images. E-commerce has enabled businesses to sell and market their online catalog of products to a massive target market.

Add a little weight to your promotional campaign with infographics, 360-degree visuals, videos, GIFs, holiday content, design, and special effects. Include some Christmas elements in your photography but try not to overdo it, because the last thing you want is to look too cheesy.

But ensure that your visuals are responsive and do not take forever to load.

• CTA Buttons are Important, Make Them Shine

If you do not want to do too much with your website, only adding a little tinsel here and there can do the trick. Make your CTA buttons stand out. Decorate them using minimalist design elements while maintaining your overall business look.

Making only subtle changes can add to holiday cheer. Use cute gift icons or bells or snowflakes to give your CTAs a celebratory look or better yet animations can always help. Additionally, jazz up the content on your CTA button; replacing the simple ‘Add to wishlist’, with ‘Add to Santa’s nice/naughty list’ can sound much merrier.

Some brands strictly follow their design guidelines — changing aesthetics can be blasphemous for them. But still having little fun with the buttons can help pay just the right amount of homage to Christmas.

• Create a Seasonal Content Calendar

During the Holiday season, things unfold at the speed of light. Customers start preparing shopping lists way ahead of time to save themselves from the hassle of finding the perfect gift in the busy holiday crowd.

Therefore, as an eCommerce platform, you should have your holiday content pre-planned and ready to go such as you should have a proper countdown or time set up to roll out discounts and special seasonal offers.

Also, make sure that all aspects of SEO are in place such as meta-description tags, pop-ups, product descriptions, and categories for cross and upselling to stay on top of the game. Last but not least, always make sure to review your content before the final rollout. 

• Highlight Special Offers and Discounts at the Top of the Page

This is that time of the year again when you are supposed to be bragging about your special discounts and 2-for-1 offer. Another way to optimize an eCommerce website for the holiday season is to use illustrations to add excitement to your discount offers.

Feature them where they are prominently displayed. Use homepage sliders, because they are back in business, baby. They let customers focus on key messages. This way you can display more than one discount offer using stunning imagery.

Using sliders can save the hassle of searching for offers, also header sliders are a great way to highlight discounts accompanied by a CTA (That’s a plus).

• Revamp the Logo to Fit the Theme

Many companies are trying to align themselves with the merriment of Christmas by modifying their branding activities accordingly. So jump on the bandwagon and design an amazing holiday version of your logo. You don’t have to do much to add joy to the brand, a mistletoe can do the trick. 

• Design your 301 and 404 Error Pages

This may seem less important but trust me, it is not. Excessive load on the website can slow it down, and also you never know of any uninvited irregularities. So it’s better to plan ahead!

If your website during the peak season is not functioning properly, it is bound to frustrate online shoppers. Make it interesting to secure your chance of having returning customers.

Customize the design of your error pages. Give ‘404’ a little Santa’s hat, draw a special custom illustration, or add a ‘dancing elf’ animation to it followed by an error message, such as: ‘Ho, ho, ho… Santa’s sleigh stuck in the snow, you finish that egg-nog, while Santa’s little helpers, help him get unstuck.

No one likes errors, not even me. But seeing this message will surely entice your customers. Humor always helps! That’s a given.

Some Additional Tips to Optimize eCommerce Website for Holiday Season 

Responsive design

Your website design should be responsive. Are you sure that it is? Re-check again! According to Statista, 177.4 million buyers in the US will buy products online using their smartphones. It’ll be a bummer if your website did not respond as it should across different devices.

Use chatbots

Use Christmas AI-driven chatbots to personalize the entire experience. Chatbots are available round the clock. With chatbots, you have little chance of missing out on customer interactions, which as a result increases conversion and customer retention rates.

Recommended: Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce — How can you integrate it?

Test your website

Run quality assurance tests of your website regularly. According to Kissmetrics stats, 47% of online customers expect web pages to load within 2 seconds. With all the shopping haul, you don’t want your customer stuck on loading, now do you?

Mobile commerce is trending

According to Big Commerce, mobile eCommerce sales are expected to account for 54% of total eCommerce sales by 2024. Optimize your website's checkout --- since it is a very crucial part of the entire customer experience. Along with that, offer additional ways for payment online apart from debit/credit cards or COD. 

Play around with virtual reality

77.24% of shoppers abandon their carts before completing a purchase. Therefore introducing VR to your eCommerce is a step in the right direction.

Up your SEO game

Use Google’s keyword planner to extract the right keywords for your content. Boost your content marketing and SEO strategy.

The Merrier the Christmas, the Better

The holidays bring quite festive web designs for eCommerce stores. You can do plenty to optimize your eCommerce website for the Holiday season. All online stores are looking to generate as many sales as possible as Christmas follows a gift-giving tradition, which is ideal for online sellers. Therefore, your eCommerce web design has to be unique.

Key Takeaways 

• Use Christmas themed color palette
• Highlight discounts and special offers using illustrations
• Use customized images to get in touch with customer’s emotions
• Mention links to your social platforms and blog content
• Modify your website design, make it more festive
• Use subtle design elements and icons to add a little joy
• Bonus: Offer free shipping and gift packaging

If you want to make your eCommerce store bag more cash this holiday season, feel free to contact Invozone — one of Canada’s leading IT companies.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year!