With peak season just around the corner, preparing your online store is essential, and it takes thoughtful planning to ensure you’re ready to maximise sales during this season.

To help with your last minute preparation, we reached out to our team of experts, including Blake Waldron (Head of Engineering), Karlie Vanderpluym (Solution Consultant) and Calvin Shelwell (Senior Project Manager) for their top last-minute strategies and tactics – from optimising your website, to effective ways to encourage urgency, we’ve gathered the best advice to set you up for success at BFCM 2024.

Karlie Vanderpluym: Consider creating product bundles with discounts to increase the consumer average order value, and providing increased discounts based on order sizes to incentivise larger orders. Implementing exclusive discounts that are time-sensitive and/or loyalty-based offers (these should be offers that you don’t typically have).

Blake Waldron: Cross-selling in checkout is a great opportunity to maximise a sale, for example, Milligram upsells ink when a fountain pen is in the cart, so ensuring there is relevancy in the upsell is important. 

If it’s possible, converting single purchases into subscriptions is a great tactic. This is a component that is coming soon to Checkout Components—a no-code app that many of Convert Digital’s clients are using to take control of their checkout via upsells and more.

Karlie Vanderpluym: A good place to start is by streamlining checkout to reduce cart abandonment by offering guest checkout, multiple payment methods (e.g. PayPal, BNPL options), free shipping. 

Calvin Shelwell: UX enhancements—simplify navigation on your website so customers can easily find what they’re looking for. 

Karlie Vanderpluym: The priority should be having a responsive customer service team ready to handle all enquiries. Consider leveraging a platform like Gorgias to preempt frequent questions and queries, so your customer service team can focus on other tasks.

Additionally, ensure your systems are well prepared. Overselling stock and failing to communicate shipping delays will quickly turn a great discount into a bad customer experience. Stay ahead of any potential issues, and be clear and upfront with customers around stock levels and shipping timelines. After all, nobody wants their brand to go viral for the wrong reasons on TikTok due to unhappy shoppers.

Calvin Shelwell: An effective way to create urgency is through scarcity tactics – highlight that certain products are limited in supply.

Karlie Vanderpluym: Run hourly or daily offers to help drive repeat visits throughout the sale period. Make sure these offers are new and don't clash with previous offers to avoid consumer frustration.

Calvin Shelwell: Brands can leverage customer data through segmentation – segment your audience based on their shopping habits, history, interests, and/or engagement level. Send personalised offers to specific groups of customers. Another tactic is to leverage partners like Searchspring to display personalised product recommendations based on customer behaviour.

Karlie Vanderpluym: Loyalty Program Offers – reward those signed up to your loyalty program with special offers that are tied to their profiles and shopping history. 

Blake Waldron: Leverage market data, shipping address, customer purchase history, products in cart to show the most relevant upsells or information to consumers.

Peak season can be an overwhelming time for ecommerce brands, but with the right strategies in place, you can effectively prepare and plan to maximise your sales.

If you need any last minute support or have specific questions, feel free to reach out at hello@convertdigital.com.au, we're here to help.