As per a report, 15% of shoppers start their holiday shopping in December. One more survey found that 47% of respondents shop at the last moment. This is because some shoppers struggle to find out the perfect gifts, and this leads to making them, what is referred to as last-minute holiday shoppers. Therefore, attracting last-minute holiday shoppers should be your top priority as they will bring in some sales at the last moment. These last-minute holiday shoppers help you gain some additional sales before the festival knocks. So here are some tips to help you handle last-minute holiday shoppers and how to help them shop effortlessly.
Customers’ Shopping behavior during the holiday season
- Online presence is a must, as 67% of shoppers plan to buy online.
- Emails help and inform shoppers about your offers, as 68% of shoppers pay attention to emails.
- 62% of shoppers buy gifts before Christmas, so proper holiday marketing is essential.
- Offering free and fast shipping is going to work for you, as 85% of shoppers prefer free to fast shipping.
10 Tips to prepare yourself for the last-minute holiday shoppers
The following tips can help you convert last-minute holiday shoppers and speed up your sales during the holiday season ahead:
1. Send holiday wishes
Send holiday wishes to your potential customers. This will remind them about your products. With each message, you can send coupon codes or promotional offers that they can avail of when they shop from you. All this will help the last-minute shoppers with what you have to offer them and gear them up for the holiday season ahead.
2. Create a gift guide
To help last-minute holiday shoppers quickly decide what to buy, make a gift guide. The gift guide should have all the possible gift ideas that can help shoppers make an informed decision. You can also bundle products together so as to speed up the sales of products that work complementary to each other. For example, you can bundle a pen with a diary, a wallet with a belt, cookies with chocolates, etc. There are several ways to bundle products together. You can come up with your own creative ideas and bundle products that you think can work this holiday season and attract customers to your offerings.
3. Offer fast shipping
The last-minute holiday shoppers are already late in their shopping, so it’s crucial to quickly deliver products to them. Work to offer Same day or Next day delivery to deliver products fast. For last-minute holiday shoppers, fast shipping is more significant than free shipping.
Additionally, display shipping deadliness to the customers. These deadlines will help in creating urgency among the last-minute holiday shoppers and will work in your favor.
4. Offer gift wrapping
Offering gift wrapping for the gifts shoppers buy will help in more conversions during the holiday season. Since the festival is around the corner for last-minute shoppers, reducing the things shoppers will have to do after purchasing the products will help you win sales over the others who don’t offer such ad-on.
5. Keep enough inventory
Inventory availability is among the top factors that influence purchase decisions. Whatever the shoppers want to buy, there must be enough inventory with you to fulfill those orders. Out-of-stock products force customers to land the other sites for the products they are unable to buy from you. Make good preparations based on your past experiences and stock the inventory based on that.
6. Optimize your website
Website optimization should be a must on your To-Do list this holiday season. Optimize your website so that it works smoothly even when there is high traffic on your site during the holidays. Since nobody wants to wait long for the website to load, the page loading speed should be kept minimum and under 2 seconds. Taking more time to load your website increases the bounce rate and leads to switching customers to other eCommerce sites. You can also perform speed tests so as to check what your website’s performance is.
7. Increase your Ad Spends
Advertising increases your reach and informs your potential customers about your products. To increase your product’s reach to more last-minute holiday shoppers, invest in advertising. Though advertising is a significant monetary expense, it will help you sell higher and recover the money incurred with the sales that it brings.
8. Deliver personalized shopping experiences
To make your messages stand out among the rest, offer a personalized shopping experience to your potential customers. Offer special prices to the customers who bought from you last year considering their past purchases. Give them the surprise of being your loyal customer.
9. Provide top-class customer service
The last-minute holiday shoppers may have questions they want to get answered quickly. So offering top-class customer service must be your priority during the festive season. You can also use this customer service to market products by utilizing the channel used to answer the FAQs. The last-minute holiday shoppers run short of time, so make your customer service fast and efficient so they get their queries resolved quickly.
10. Incorporate eCommerce automation
Automation is the key to success in eCommerce. Orders management, inventory management, product uploading, returns/refunds, etc. There is so much to work on when selling online. With so many tasks that you need to manage, manually accomplishing them is not so easy. So eCommerce automation can help you simplify the online selling processes so that you can focus on the aspects that can help you reach more last-minute holiday shoppers.
How CedCommerce can make selling easy this holiday season in 2022?
The festive rush accompanied by last-minute shoppers is uneasy to handle. Get Integration from CedCommerce to connect your store and make mundane tasks quick. The Integrations come with features, including Auto order acknowledgment, Bulk product uploading, Inventory synchronization, Order management, Returns/Refunds Management, Shipment Management, Notifications, etc.
The above and many more features, accompanied by Round O’clock support via a Personal account manager help you excel and sell online seamlessly. Reach out to Ced experts to learn more about these features.
Bonus resources:
- How to prepare Walmart Shopify stores for Christmas?
- Black Friday Marketing Guide To Sell Higher on Walmart
- 9 Things to Remember to Make Record-Breaking Sales on Walmart this Festive Season
- Walmart BFCM: The Perfect To-Do Checklist For a Successful Year-End
- What to Sell at Walmart for Halloween?
To Sum Up
Proper implementation of the above tips will help you capitalize on the last-minute holiday shoppers and gain more conversions. Help last-minute shoppers in shopping for the products they are searching for in a quick and easy manner to simplify their holiday shopping.