Prepare your e-commerce site for the sales

How to prepare your e-commerce site for sales (and private sales)

They are coming soon... The summer sales will start in France on Wednesday, June 22, and will end on Tuesday, July 19. During these four weeks, retailers will be displaying discounts and exceptional offers to boost their sales and sell off their stocks.

This is a very important period for many sectors, the most important of which is online commerce. But to make the most of this long-awaited period, it's best to anticipate it and set up your online store several weeks before the rush starts!

Discover how to prepare and optimize your e-commerce site for the 2022 summer sales (but also for your private sales), in order to increase your conversion rate and the average basket of your customers.

Optimize the technical aspect of your site

When you know that the majority of the revenue collected during the sales is during the first week, and often even during the first day, being perfectly sure of your site's capacity to take in exceptionally high traffic is essential.

Therefore, take care to contact your host in order to anticipate the massive influx of visitors. They will be able to give you a safety margin in terms of server capacity, for a fee of course!

Set up caches, load tests... Brief your technical teams to be sure of the solidity of your site and do a complete check-up in advance. Also prepare your customer support teams before the sales rush, so that they are ready to face the increase in requests.

Also, think about optimizing the user experience (UX ) of your visitors, by making sure that your pages load quickly and that the navigation on your online store is smooth. To do this, you can use the dedicated Google tool. This tool will also allow you to optimize the speed of your application, which will also be essential to optimize before the sales!

Take care of the aesthetic aspect of your site

For this exceptional period, your site needs to change its skin (at least in part), so that visitors are immediately attracted to your offers and promotions.

To do this, consider redesigning your pages to reflect the sale period. Immersing your customers in the summer atmosphere can only improve their experience and allow you to convert more visits.

You can also create additional tabs on your store, which will correspond to specific categories dedicated to summer sales. Make sure these are easy to find and attractive to your visitors!

Don't hesitate to clearly highlight the best deals on your site, as these are the ones your customers will be looking for first. A godsend if you want to sell out quickly.

It is also in your best interest to place stimulating calls to action (CTA ) for your visitors on your most visited pages. These will allow you to create a sense of urgency, for example by highlighting time-limited offers, which will boost your sales a little more.

Boost your marketing and communication

To be sure to get a maximum of visibility and traffic at the beginning of the sales, nothing better than launching a dedicated campaign on social networks. Here again, this kind of operation should be prepared weeks or even months in advance. Focus on your most developed networks and highlight your most interesting offers.

On the marketing side, emailing campaigns can also be set up before the launch of summer promotions, with content specifically dedicated to the sales, and personalized for your historical customers!

In the same way, do not hesitate to communicate especially to your most loyal customers about your private sales as soon as you organize them.

Whether it's teasing during sales, or announcing these types of events outside of the traditional summer and winter promotional periods, offering membership cards or newsletter subscriptions to participate in private sales will help you increase customer engagement.

In addition, if you want to increase your traffic in anticipation of this key period, there is nothing better than a targeted content campaign. Published regularly, both in advance and throughout the sales period, blog posts (such as a "Top deals not to be missed during the 2022 summer sales") could bring you many leads.

Offer payment facilities to your customers

The optimization of payment methods is not necessarily the first parameter that one thinks of when it comes to preparing one's online store for the sales. And yet, it is a fundamental criterion for many consumers, as cash payment is often a barrier to purchase.

Thus, offering relevant payment options to your visitors (without unnecessarily multiplying the number of available options) can greatly contribute to facilitating the passage to the purchase act.

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) solutions such as deferred payment (pay after 15, 30 or even 45 days), split payment (pay in 3 or 4 instalments in order to smooth out your expenses) or payment adjusted to your merchant needs (payment on due date, on delivery...) are increasingly requested by consumers

They allow for better budget management and greater freedom of consumption on the customer's side, but also a better conversion rate and better cash management on the merchant's side. For example, a deferred payment within 15 days, coupled with return conditions fixed at 14 days after the purchase, allows the customer not to be debited in case of return!

As the summer sales period approaches, and as consumers' purchasing power is still suffering from the aftermath of the health and Ukrainian crises, your customers need to facilitate their purchases with simple solutions. Adapted to each profile, the BNPL solutions proposed by Pledg will help your customers to consume without jeopardizing their budget or restricting themselves.

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