5 Ways to Increase Ecommerce Sales this Holiday Season

Want to increase eCommerce sales in this upcoming 2019 holiday season?

Um, who wouldn’t…right?!

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and each day leading up to Christmas is an opportunity to increase eCommerce sales past what you made last holiday season.

Test, Rinse, Repeat

The holiday season is also an opportunity to test new products, try out new strategies, and figure out how you can then take your eCommerce sales to the next level in the following holiday season.

It’s a never ending cycle of testing, measuring results, and moving forward with the new gems that you’ve found.

Before founding and deciding to run FreeUp full time as its Chief Marketing Officer, I was on the yearly eCommerce holiday grind working to increase eCommerce sales year over year.

From 2009 through 2015, my business partner, Nathan Hirsch, and I were working endless nights and weekends making sure that we were optimizing our sales as much as possible and learning from each year so we could make sales even better the following one.

For Growth

It was an exhausting process, but it forced us to continue to grow and it led to real increases in our eCommerce sales.

From the time that we started selling online in 2009 until when we halted selling in 2015/2016, we sold over $25 million in total sales through our eCommerce business.

It certainly came with its ups and downs, but it was an amazing experience which has allowed us to grow the FreeUp Marketplace into one that caters specifically to other eCommerce businesses and entrepreneurs who are also looking to maximize sales.

5 Ways to Increase Ecommerce Sales this Holiday Season

In this article, I am going to share 5 ways that you can increase eCommerce sales this holiday season.

Some you can do on your own. For others, you may want to tap into eCommerce specialists from the FreeUp Marketplace. Either way, these tips should help you to maximize your earnings this holiday season.

For selling on Amazon

Pro Tip #1: Be active with your pricing every single day

When it comes to selling on Amazon, pricing plays a major factor.

If you’re selling a product that is not private labeled, you will have other sellers on the product listing competing with you for the sale at all times. Even more so during the holiday season!

And even if you’re selling your own private label products, there are always going to be similar options on Amazon where the customer can search and compare the pricing.

Best Price

The Amazon Marketplace has built its entire reputation built on the best available price for its customers and this year, they’re even offering free shipping to ALL customers… not just Prime users. Did you see that yet?

With all of this in mind, it’s super important that you have a clear strategy for monitoring and adjusting your pricing over the holiday season…on a daily basis.

Repricers

Now, there are of course tools out there (like Informed.co, Channel Advisor Amazon Repricing, and many others)  that you can purchase and then configure to reprice your products based off the competition and the current Buy Box price. I’ve used these in the past and have seen great success with them so I definitely recommend giving them a look if you’re not using one already.

But sometimes the software doesn’t do everything 100% how you want it to.

Manual Repricing

Another way that you can keep an eye on pricing and optimize to increase eCommerce sales is by hiring an eCommerce virtual assistant that monitors your products, their pricing, and what competitors are selling at as well.

For example, you may hire an eCommerce virtual assistant that has this type of pricing experience and have them look at your most popular products 2-3 times per day during the holiday season seeing if they can make small price adjustments to increase eCommerce sales.

With the volume of people shopping during the holidays, small changes with your pricing can go a long way when it comes to your overall sales.

Pro Tip #2: Tap into the power of Amazon PPC

Amazon PPC advertising is a powerful platform that allows you to advertise your products to Amazon shoppers as they are searching and browsing the Amazon Marketplace.

If you aren’t already tapping into this ever-evolving tool that Amazon offers through its platform to increase eCommerce sales, this holiday season may be the time to get started.

With Amazon PPC, you can target specific keywords, compete against the competition, advertise on specific similar products, and much more.

Expertise Required

Now, the thing to be wary of is that it is not a platform that you can just learn and master within days. Similar to Google Adwords and Facebook advertising, it takes time to really understand what strategies work on Amazon PPC.

From my experience and knowledge of the platform, it’s best to hire an Amazon PPC freelancer if you don’t personally have the knowledge and expertise to handle it on your own. And you need to start right now so you’ll have a little time for campaign tweaks before the real shopping days come.

For someone in the US, you may pay $30 to $50 per hour for a qualified Amazon PPC freelancer. And if you’re comfortable hiring someone from outside the US, you may pay $15 to $30 per hour depending on the individual. You can of course find these types of freelancers using the FreeUp Marketplace. Sign up here.

If you’re goal is to increase eCommerce sales this holiday season on Amazon, Amazon PPC should be a strategy that you look into.

For selling on your own website

Pro Tip #3: Engage your email list, traffic, and past customers with discounts and specials

If you’re looking to increase eCommerce sales on your own website, you will need to use slightly different strategies.

These next 3 pro tips apply to you if you’re using Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, etc.

Running a stand-alone online store of course has its own advantages and disadvantages over selling on a marketplace like Amazon. One of the biggest advantages is having ownership over your customers and their data.

When you run your own online store, you’re responsible for driving traffic and converting those visitors to customers, but you then have their information and can create a relationship with them.

This holiday season, make sure that you’re tapping into the following methods to increase eCommerce sales for your new traffic and existing customers.

• Engage your email list: Each time you get a new customer, make sure that you ask them to opt in for your email list. During the holidays, create campaigns that reach out to your customers and engage them with sales, promotions, and special contests. This can go a long way in increasing your eCommerce sales.
• Re-engage your lost traffic: On most eCommerce platforms, you can see information for the customers that you lost in the cart somewhere along the way. They came to your site, added a product to the cart, and maybe even started the shopping process, but then they left. Set up a re-engagement campaign so that you reach out to each of those lost potential customers and get them to come back. Maybe you offer a discount if they check out within a certain time frame. There’s plenty of ways to re-engage.
• Engage on social media: Hopefully you’ve built a following through social media for your online store and brand. Take the time to engage those past and potential customers with content and promotions each day of the holiday season. Be active with them, ask questions, offer deals, post video content, and make sure they know you care.

Executing a combination of these 3 pro tips along with any others that you’re already finding success with should increase eCommerce sales for you during the holiday season.

Pro Tip #4: Drive traffic using Facebook and Instagram ads

Similar to utilizing the Amazon PPC advertising platform on the Amazon Marketplace, tapping into the power of Facebook and Instagram advertising during the holiday season can be an absolute game changer for driving new traffic and sales to your online store.

Think about it…

During the holidays, people are constantly on their phone looking for gift ideas for their loved ones. They are on social media with buying for someone they love in the back of their mind.

And they’re just waiting for the right idea to pop up so they can take action and check that person off their gift list.

The holidays present such an opportune time to tap into Facebook and Instagram advertising to get your products shown to people that have a high intent to buy and to buy FAST.

Again, the Facebook ad platform is not a 1-2-3 type platform where anyone can use it and see immediate results in terms of sales and traffic. In order to really maximize your ad costs with Facebook and Instagram, you want someone who knows what they’re doing and has done it successfully for handfuls of other companies before you.

Pro Tip #5: Focus on your conversion rates every day

While running an online store, your conversion rate makes a HUGE difference in how much you end up making.

A 4% conversion rate vs a 5% conversion on 10,000 users coming to your site makes a big difference.

That’s 400 sales vs 500 sales!

With that in mind, focusing on your conversion rates and doing everything possible to increase them during the holiday season can make a significant impact on your total sales.

You can do this by checking in daily on your conversion rates and utilizing different CRO tactics to improve your product page, your cart experience, and your final checkout experience.

Or you can hire a CRO expert to handle the management of the metric for you so that you can focus on other things. It really all comes down to where your time is best spent during the holiday season.

Regardless of which you choose, working to optimize your conversion rate every day of the holiday season should increase eCommerce sales for your online store.

Conclusion

Take these 5 pro tips and implement the ones that mean the most to you within your business to increase eCommerce sales this holiday season.

From my experience, there was always another way that we could have been more efficient with our holiday seasons when we looked back on it each January.

There was always something we could have done more of or another strategy that we saw others have success with that we weren’t doing yet.

The holiday season is the ultimate time to capitalize on sales and net earnings so that you have a good stash saved up to grow more in the following year.

Don’t miss out on the amazing sales potential standing in front of you this holiday season.

What other strategies are you finding useful to increase eCommerce sales?

Share them with us on Facebook with the hashtag #ecommercesales!