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It will come as no surprise to anyone that from March of 2020, our online ordering levels have increased significantly as we spend more and more time at home unable to shop in the way that we used to. Lockdown has hit bricks and mortar retailers, hard, and the loss of countless, well- loved high street brands has had a devastating effect on the industry. However we're seeing an impressively quick turnaround of offerings in response to our ever changing spending habits.

With Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and (a very welcomed) New Year approaching at the speed of light, online retailers who have already had a very busy year, are about to get a whole lot busier. An unexpected spike in traffic can leave your site slow to load, unresponsive and altogether not that happy. An unhappy site = unhappy customers, and unhappy customers = an unhappy you.

The crucial dates to look out for this year are:

<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/primeday/?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=googhydr-21&amp;hvadid=366575522321&amp;hvpos=&amp;hvexid=&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=7026143722262917854&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvdev=c&amp;ref=pd_sl_9em14cilft_e">Amazon Prime Day</a> 13th-14th Oct

Black Friday 27th Nov

Cyber Monday 30th Nov

Christmas Need we tell you?

Boxing day sales 26th Dec

January Sales
<h4>So, are you prepared?</h4>
If your site isn't prepared, this can lead to unresponsive pages (or even crashes), leading to your customers having a poor user experience. And what do angry customers on the phone lead to? Yes, they will be costing you money... and multiple grey hairs.

Shopping on the go becomes more and more common every day, more pageviews on mobile devices leading to fast increases in transactions and revenue. More than half of Google's searches are made on mobile, and last year only over 26% of Black Friday orders came through a mobile device. This means that you must focus your attention on this and optimise your site properly for mobile devices. And this doesn't just mean the homepage, but throughout the site, and most importantly, the checkout page!

If you don't know where to start, here's what you need to do: make sure your site speed is under 3 seconds, to prevent your impatient customers from leaving before the content is fully loaded, and that you don’t have any functionality issues with your checkout, so they don’t run away before finalising the purchase. If the checkout is not optimised, it can seem 'clunky' and hard to navigate, making it difficult to complete their order and producing holiday sale losses for you.
No one likes error messages. You know you don't and you know your customers won't either. When that little pop-up makes its way onto your customers' screen, frustration will take hold and carts will be abandoned, and abandoned carts = abandoned money, and no one likes that.
Instead, try this. Errors happen when the order processor is overloaded, with a CDN (Content Delivery Network) implemented you can put a 'waiting room' feature in place which detects when the processor can't keep up. So instead of going ahead and jamming the order through, a page containing a message of your choice, for example, 'Sorry to keep you waiting', will appear. This can include features such as a waiting time, 'you may also like..', or some other offers to tempt the customer. The main goal is to get them to stick around, so even if you have to show a video of dancing cats wearing elf hats, as long as it keeps them engaged, do it. While dancing cats entertain your user, the page will regularly refresh in the background, and will let the order through as and when the processor becomes less loaded. The main goal is to make the experience quick and easy, if you give people any excuses to hit and run, they will.

Black Friday customers have no tolerance for slow or tedious processes. They know what they want and they want it quickly. If your checkout involves registration forms, questions, and multiple stages, chances are they may get frustrated and leave. To speed things up for them and maximise engagement, try removing the compulsory registration step and allow people to checkout as guests. This will attract those who are in a rush to get a quick deal, and will instantly increase your holiday sale rates. If you're worried about not gaining customer insights this way, maybe try an extra deal for logged in customers, for example, an extra 10% off for VIP customers.

Last year the abandoned cart rates were as high as 68% on average, and up to 78% on mobile. This could be due to various reasons, most common being customers simply changing their mind, or it could be due to a slow site speed, confusing checkout steps or site crashes. Try your very best to avoid these in the first place but don't worry because although these figures are pretty high, a large portion of these customers can be nudged along nicely to finalise their order with some persuasive cart abandonment emails... sneaky. Last year these emails generated an average conversion rate of 17.6%, which is some easy added revenue if you're prepared.

During the festive period, people will be much more receptive to your ads compared to, say the 3rd Monday in April. So... MAKE. IT. COUNT. Plan your ads and ad creative ahead of time.
If you're not a regular paid advertising user, now will be the time to become one. Keep the content relevant and engaging and before you know it you'll have customers flooding through the gates (metaphorically speaking of course..).
But if you’re already advertising on Google, but looking to expand your online advertising reach, a quick win would be using Bing CPC, and it’s very easy now to import your campaigns into Bing in one-click. Also, you could start promoting your business imagery in Pinterest advertising, as sessions from Pinterest tend to have a high AOV already, or increase your customer engagement using Twitter advertising.

We bet you are thinking about, and maybe even prepared, your PPC holiday campaigns already. But do you have the tracking in place to measure everything?
If you use Google Adwords, Facebook Ads or any form of paid advertising, then you should place the tracking code (pixels) on your site - make sure you implement and manage them via Google Tag Manager, so that you don't overload your site pages code with scripts, and negatively affect the performance. By doing this, you are able track and see detailed metric reports on all impressions, page views, social media conversions and email opens, as well as targeting your specific holiday sale audience using targeted advertising. In other words, you'll make sure your carefully crafted adverts are not going to waste by falling on deaf ears.
You will also be able to target your previous visitors, to reach those who have been on your site that one time last year, or that person who left your site in a rush and forgot to ever come back. It is a well known fact that it is much easier to sell to existing customers, or people who vaguely know about you, than it is to target brand new customers... so these people are the ones to target as they will be much more receptive to your advertising, especially during the Christmas season.
On a similar note... check how you could customise your Google Analytics in order to get the most out of it.

<h3></h3>
<h3>In Summary</h3>
Sure, some of these are big and risky pieces of work - replacing a 5-step checkout process with a single page, single step approach in the next 2 weeks when you've done no work is going to be tough to achieve. Even making a decision that this is the best approach for your site based off heuristic data, video/mouse recording and getting management buy-in could swallow up the next 2 weeks - but there's probably steps you can take.
If you haven't got abandoned cart emails setup (and the number of clients we meet that have a great relationship with vendors such as dotMailer, Ometria and others that don't have this in place) then you can set this up really easily - just get it done, tomorrow!
Get a good number of your own staff and trusted clients to try and shop and checkout on mobile. If you haven't done it for a while, see if there are any dead ends, errors, or actions and text falling off the screen that can be fixed easily.
If you haven't got good metrics and user interaction tracking in place, speak to someone who can do this for you - whether it's us, or your chosen ecommerce or digital marketing agency - it's simple work and even if it doesn't make a difference in the first few hours or days of this manic period, you can make informed decisions of changes as you move through the whole period.
Try load testing your site to see how it performs under pressure, if you're not sure. "Hoping it works" may work but we prefer real numbers. Something like <a href="https://loadimpact.com/">LoadImpact</a> is cheap and cheerful and gets the job done well. If your site is struggling under load, speak to your ecommerce agency or hosting partner - they should be able to scale your kit accordingly.
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If we can be of help to you, either for some simple advice, a site review, CRO or user journey recommendations or anything else, feel free to <a href="https://www.logicspot.com/about-us/contact-us/">contact us</a> - we're here for you!

How to get your eCommerce site ready for sale season

In the tech industry, the term “headless” first appeared a few years ago but now the early adoption phase has passed it is becoming the norm for CMS sites and especially eCommerce platforms. The industry is at a turning point, with all the major players, whether it be <a href="https://magento.com/blog/best-practices/headless-commerce-digital-differentiator">Magento</a>, <a href="https://www.shopify.co.uk/plus/solutions/headless-commerce">Shopify</a> or <a href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/headless-commerce/">BigCommerce</a> promising that headless is the future of eCommerce.

The need to go headless comes from modern customers demanding more online shopping capabilities and expecting the many benefits provided by a headless solution. Once we explain these benefits you will see the need to get ahead of your competition and future proof your online platforms with a headless approach.

<h3 class="p1">What is a Headless website?</h3>
A headless website means separating or “decoupling” the presentation layer of your website that your customers see from the underlying backend engines that handle your data. 
To understand how having a headless site can benefit your business, we must first understand the traditional way eCommerce sites were built when they were first released back in the early 2000’s.
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<h3 class="p1">The old way, monolithic systems</h3>

In a traditional eCommerce system, the backend technology is tightly coupled with the frontend templating. In this setup your backend systems, integrations, content editing and frontend UI templates are bound together, updating one usually means affecting the other.
This approach involves using the methods determined by the vendor such as Magento, usually heavily relying on their processes, templates and their choice of technology. This also creates a dependency where frontend development is constantly tied together with the backend, leading to a slower development process and issues when wanting to adopt new technologies.
Magento is a prime example of this, comprising a huge file structure containing layer upon layer of abstraction. This means that even simple updates can be time-consuming and the development process is staggered.
Bear in mind this technology was developed to meet the needs of the era, back then, most users would likely only be using desktop devices and following a basic customer journey. The mobile era had not hit and eCommerce had not fully taken off compared to the engagement it is receiving today.
Due to the demands and expectations of the modern consumer, it is time for a change..

<h3 class="p1">The modern way, headless solutions</h3>

The modern approach is to divorce the backend architecture and the frontend UI, essentially removing the head of your application, i.e the frontend traditionally provided by the vendor, while still using the backend engine to store and provide endpoints for your data.
This shifts towards an API centered environment which connects the two ends of your application, allowing an improved development process, quicker time to market and a faster, more personalised experience for your customers. Let’s take a deep dive into the benefits a headless site can provide your business.
The benefits of going headless: A need for speed
Website speed is a vital criteria for SEO rankings, user satisfaction and conversion rates, especially on mobile where most of your customers will be viewing your site. Speed is critically important for eCommerce sites, the faster your website is, the higher your conversion rate will be. A recent study found that website conversion rates dropped by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time. 

(source: https://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/research-site-speed-hurting-everyones-revenue.htm).
Headless sites provide a faster experience as they do not depend on whatever technology the platforms such as Magento or BigCommerce choose. With headless you have full control of your tech stack, so you can use the latest and greatest tools, enabling you to create modern websites that can produce amazing performance results. As you are no longer constrained to the vendor system, you can quickly adapt your site to keep up with the constantly changing criteria Google and other search engines use to judge your website performance.
Being able to improve your site speed will not only increase the conversion rate on your eCommerce site but will also decrease the number of customers who leave your site to go to a competitor.
 
<h3 class="p1">Flexibility with microservices</h3>

Headless allows a microservices-based approach, meaning you can add extra services to your platform without needing to rely on 3rd party integrations or heavy customisation just to get started. Because headless commerce works through a system of APIs, it’s possible to integrate with virtually all third-party tools. (Perhaps a list of microservices here, such as Akeneo, Klevu etc)
For example, eCommerce sites are not renowned for having quality Page Builder solutions out of the box, and adding 3rd party offerings comes with several risks. With a headless site, you can simply add a headless CMS like Contentful or Storyblok for feature-rich content management.

<h3 class="p1">Mobile and beyond, the Internet of Things (IoT)</h3>

Mobile eCommerce is growing year on year and by 2021 up to 73% of sales will be through mobile devices (<a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/13139/estimated-worldwide-mobile-e-commerce-sales/">https://www.statista.com/chart/13139/estimated-worldwide-mobile-e-commerce-sales/</a>). 
As the shift to mobile continues, the number of devices your customers are purchasing products on is ever growing. Think voice-powered speakers, kiosk screens, wearable tech i.e smart watches or even shopping from your Tesla dashboard (it could happen!), whatever the future may hold, be ready for it with headless. According to Google, 85 percent of people start shopping on one device and finish shopping on another.
A headless site allows for quicker adoption of new technologies, enabling you to have an omnichannel environment, providing seamless customer experience no matter what device they are using. Customer data is available across every touch point, letting merchants offer relevant promotions and offers to customers, and creating personalized, meaningful shopping experiences.
Headless supports PWA technology
Headless sites go hand in hand with the technology required to offer a Progressive Web App to your mobile users. The benefits of a Progressive Web App deserve their own post but here is a summary of what having a PWA can offer:

<ul class="ul1">
 <li class="li1">Increased security</li>
 <li class="li1">Native mobile app-like experience</li>
 <li class="li1">Send push notifications to your visitors</li>
 <li class="li1">Ability to display content to your users even when they’re offline</li>
 <li class="li4">Can be installed on a user's home screen for easy access to your products</li>
</ul>
Faster time to market and smoother deployments
As mentioned previously, a decoupled architecture means frontend changes can be made without disrupting the backend systems and vice versa. For example a new promotional page could be rolled out by the frontend team without needing to rely on the backend team at all.
Traditionally, commerce brands using a monolithic platform usually roll out an update every few weeks. However, deployments are streamlined with a headless site as it is no longer necessary to redeploy the entire system every time a change is made. This means little to no downtime for deployments so they can happen much more frequently.
Did you know Amazon deploys updates on average every 11.7 seconds.
Talk to us

Get in touch with us <a href="https://www.logicspot.com/about-us/contact-us/">here</a> if you would like to discuss building a headless website.