Last Minute Preparations For Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is still on. It’s on and promises to be a booming occasion for both businesses and consumers. With businesses still being cautious with allowing crowds into their premises, we’ve seen more of these big names putting in efforts to keep to Covid-19 regulations and still reach their Black Friday goals. You can therefore expect a bigger move towards online sales and especially Cyber Monday.

By now you should have already decided on your deals and ensured that your customers are well informed and prepared for the big day.

Cyber Monday 2020 Predictions

Merging Of Black Friday And Cyber Monday

Black Friday online deals are nothing new but unlike previous years we can expect more consumers expecting and preparing for online deals from Black Friday till Cyber Monday. This will make Black Friday and Cyber Monday even more indistinguishable.

Increase In Online Sales

We are still not out of the woods yet as far as Covid-19 is concerned. So we can expect an increase in online sales as a result of caution being taken and a little bit of fear in some consumers. Salesforce’s Global Shopping Index showed a 71% growth in global online sales and a 19% growth in South African online sales during level 3 lockdown.

More Competition

The e-commerce bug has bitten a lot of business since the rise of the pandemic. Even the late bloomers have jumped onto this wagon as an effort to remain relevant and survive these tough economic times. This means that the competition will be higher this years as retailers and small businesses battle it out to win consumers over. It’s a survival of the fittest kind of situation, and any glitch could have you losing consumers to your competitor.

There is really no room for imperfection on this day!

Preparing For Cyber Monday

Prepare Your Site

Cyber Monday is like a free event with the biggest line up of artist. You need to be prepared for the traffic and the demand that comes with it.

Here are some points to look at when preparing your site:

• Site Speed: There is nothing as discouraging as a slow site on a day when everyone is rushing to get the best deals. Use Google’s Developmental Tools to test your site speed and get suggestions on how to improve your speed.
• Mobile Compatibility: Work with your developers to make sure that your customers will have the same experience when accessing your site on both desktop and mobile device. Check out Google’s Test My Site to test your mobile site’s compatibility.
• Secure Your Site: If you do not have a lock icon next to your URL, Google will tag your website as not secured and customers will not trust you with their information. Visit GoDaddy to get assistance with getting an SSL Certificate and securing your website.

• Assess Your Checkout Experience: Make it as easy as possible for your customers to checkout to increase conversion and checkout speed by reducing the clicks required to make a purchase.

  Here are a few tips on making the experience better:

  • Make it mobile-friendly
  • Allow customers to easily modify their order
  • Offer a variety of payment options
  • Offer a variety of options for customers to receive their order, eg. Free shipping, store pick up…
  • Remove unnecessary fields.

• Set up tools to monitor customer behaviour: Growth comes from learning from mistakes. These tools will help you to recognise where customers get stuck and the chart abandonment rate in order for you to work on strategies to ensure that more visitors go through with their purchase.

  Google Analytics is the most popular software that will track the traffic to your website, One of it’s best features is it’s Goal Funnel which will help you with the following:

  • Finding out how many customers go through the purchase process
  • How many of them abandon their purchase and at what stage
  • See the keywords that people use to find your website
  • Find out which of your pages attract more customers

Prepare Your Inventory

Make sure that your inventory levels will be enough to cater for the demand. There are inventory management apps and certain point of sale systems, like Waitr, that can assist you in managing your inventory. It is also vital to ensure that you have enough staff member on duty to help with the demand. Furthermore, you need to ensure that there is constant communication between your site and the warehouse so that you do not sell any product that you won’t be able to deliver.

Free Delivery

One of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment is high delivery fees. Offering your consumers free delivery is a good way to increase your conversion rate and a way to stand out from your competitors. Consumers find free shipping attractive and are more likely to follow through with their purchase when the costs remain steady from the product page to checkout.