For ecommerce companies, the most wonderful time of the year can be fraught with chilly challenges. Retailers can’t predict everything, but there are a few roadblocks you can be sure of:
Consumers are being more cautious with their money: Recent inflation, interest rate hikes, and uncertainty around a looming recession have had the unsurprising effect of slowing consumer spending.
Buyers demand a frictionless experience (and fast!): With more ways to shop than ever, consumers will increasingly leave your site without buying if they can’t get what they need quickly.
Your brand can’t do the heavy lifting: Fullstory’s recent global consumer survey found that almost half of global shoppers don’t care where they buy from—as long as they’re given a great experience.
For a successful holiday season, preparation is key. Here are a few ways you can head off the inevitable holiday crunch, whether or not you’ve decided to implement a code freeze.
For a deeper dive on holiday prep for online retailers, download the complete guide here.
5 ways to head off the holiday crunch
Get your checkout flow on the nice list
It’s not news to ecommerce pros that the checkout process is an extremely sensitive stage in the shopper’s journey. Your digital experience analytics platform can go a long way in helping to ensure that a bumpy checkout isn’t turning prospective buyers away.
When attempting to find and address friction in the checkout flow, it’s best to divide the work into two steps:
1. Define the events in your checkout flow and organize them as a funnel: Identify each step in the process and define them as a performance metric to gain a full understanding.
2. Combine your metrics into a dashboard to centralize the process: A central location can show you the overall completion rate through all steps within your checkout flow, as well as the number of users who make it to each stage.
Click here for more tips on fine-tuning your check-out experience.
Don’t leave site performance out in the cold
When it comes to ways to quickly lose would-be customers, slow page load speeds are at the top of the list—and speed is especially critical during the holiday season when sites and apps experience higher-than-normal traffic.
To get a handle on how site performance might affect conversion rates, we recommend monitoring page speed metrics including:
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
DOMContentLoaded (DCL)
Page Load
Fullstory allows you to layer the page speed metrics onto any of your funnels or segments and help you identify the site’s slowest pages related to any search or segment.
Design a mobile experience for holiday magic
Mobile phones now account for the majority of ecommerce site traffic globally, and this holiday season will likely be no different.
In addition to ensuring a spotless, frustration-free checkout flow with an emphasis on excellent performance (as you would on your website), your DXI tool can help you highlight the mobile experience in just a few steps:
Step 1: Use the default segment Mobile to quickly perform a search for all users visiting via mobile device.
Step 2: Add additional search criteria to drill down to iOS vs. Android, or to focus only on customers who visited the /cart page.
Step 3: Watch several sessions and you'll quickly discover any stumbling blocks that need to be fixed. Or, review additional metrics to see aggregate insights specific to this segment of users.
Keep the sleigh running smoothly during a busy time
No matter how proactively you plan for the holiday season, unforeseen issues will inevitably crop up. The right DXI platform can help you ensure quick, effective fixes by helping you:
Lean on your tools more effectively: When employees are on vacation during the holidays, you should be able to rely on your tools rather than individual employees to serve as a single source of truth and to notify the right folks at the right time when issues arise.
Utilize self-service functions: Features like live chat to handle basic questions and easy-to-find FAQ sections can go a long way when you’re shorthanded.
Learn about how Fullstory is helping our customers prepare for the holidays.
Spread the holiday cheer (via insights across your organization)
The best digital experience intelligence tools won’t mean much if your insights are siloed and only available to your team. Fullstory captures all customer interactions in a digital experience hub that is available to teams across the organization, ensuring that everyone is working with the same data.
For instance, product managers can use relevant insights to prioritize features and fixes, ensuring their product roadmap is aligned with the organization’s core goals. Developers can use data to find the root cause of bugs, saving precious time and resources. Support teams can use Session Replay to see exactly what the user does, eliminating unnecessary back and forth.
To access the full insights, click here to download the complete holiday prep guide.
