Christmas sales are often the difference between a good year and a bad year for retail businesses in the US and across the world. Despite all of the disruption that’s taken place this year, the Christmas shopping market is always a chance for consumers to spend on gifts and new purchases for their home, while it’s a chance for businesses to ramp up their marketing output, and grow from regional or local stores into national or even international ones. This piece offers a complete guide to how you can scale up your retail business in time for the Christmas rush this year.
Going National
If you’re a local or provincial business, with one brick-and-mortar store in a local city or town center, this is your year to expand your horizons by offering your products to the entire country. This doesn’t mean opening up more stores – indeed, this isn’t advised at a time of great economic uncertainty. What’s more profitable is taking your operations online, and concentrating on building an online sales platform that’ll attract purchases from across the country. To do this, you should:
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Boost your web design, which we’ll go into more detail on later
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Remove all the ‘local’ references from your website, in order to seem truly national
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Underscore that your firm offers fast delivery to the whole of the US
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Make sure that you’re boosting your website’s SEO and visibility across all states of the country
By making sure that consumers can find your site wherever they live, and that they’ll believe you’ll get your products to them speedily, you’ll increase your trade nationally this winter.
Web Design
In order to make the most of increased traffic that you’re experiencing this winter, you’re going to want to make your website as good as it can be, within the budget that you have to dedicate to these changes. To main changes are required to your website: you need to make your products pages as slick, professional, and trustworthy as possible. This will encourage more consumers to fill up a cart on your site.
But you also need to ensure that you’re offering multiple payments options at the checkout, and that you’re able to remove all the friction from the transaction that consumers will be making on your website. Look at UX and user journeys in order to inform this approach.
National Delivery
Delivering packages on a local level is easy. You can do it yourself, with a special team of drivers, or you can ask your local courier service to pick up orders that you wish to have delivered as soon as possible to your local customers. It’s a little trickier when you’re looking to service the national community.
Here, you need order fulfillment on a far larger scale. You need your products to be picked, packaged, delivered and returned in a smooth operation. Check out this site for an example of a company that provides outsourced national deliveries and order fulfillment successfully in the US – helping you make customers happy this winter.
Use these quick tips to guide you towards a more national customer base this winter.
