Best Practices for the Holiday Season

The holidays are here. It is that time of the year where everyone is buying gifts for their loved ones -- and themselves. This is the perfect window to put the best practices in place that will maximize your end of year sales!

Overall Holiday Preparation

Here are some general tips on how to prepare for the holidays:

1. Identify your best products, collections and promotions that are most suitable for the holiday season in advance, such as Holiday, Gift, Discounted and Seasonal items. With so many shopping sites for customers, you want to put your best foot forward on home page merchandising.
2. Test your holiday promotions in advance, to determine what works with your shoppers. As good place to start is to see whether discounting on Most Popular items or on a Featured Collection perform better for this season. Our A/B platform can help you easily test and learn to maximize value later. Learn more about how to use our A/B test feature here.
3. Define your promotion and advertising calendar up front, along with the associated budget for each. Getting as much of the creative done now will also cut down on stress during the holiday season.  

Recommendation Best Practices

Based on data from thousands of online stores in the past couple of years, LimeSpot has identified the most effective recommendation placements for the holidays. Today we're sharing them with you:

1. Maximize your most important real estate. As you know, your home page is your welcome mat for shoppers; showcasing the best of the season and the top products will keep more of them on site.  Adding a Featured Collection with your holiday, gifts or discounted items, gives customers visibility to holiday specific merchandise. Our data shows that adding  this recommendation box on top of your home page, search and landing pages increases engagement. If you are a high-traffic store, Trending recommendations tend to outperform Most Popular Items.  
2. Increase your cart size by adding the Frequently Bought Together recommendation box on your product page.  Similar to the Amazon experience, this shows products that go together with the product being viewed based on your historical data. Shoppers trust their peers!
3. Increase your order size with Upsell and Cross-sell. If you know that certain products are an obvious match (e.g. a printer and its toner, a necklace and earrings of the same design), take advantage of this information. Check out these articles on assigning matching products and  prioritizing related items to learn more. And make sure Related Items is enabl
   ed for the Product page!
4. Update the Upsell recommendation box fallback to use one of your shopping-season collections (e.g. Holidays, Gifts or Discounted). This will ensure that your shoppers see those collections and have a quick option to buy them just before checking out, regardless of what product they have in their cart.
5. Activate your post-purchase recommendations (Thank You and Order Status pages), by adding your most aggressive and discounted offerings to this page. Use a Featured Collection box and show them off, since it is the best place for you to sell more while your shopper is in shopping mode!

Get ready for the busiest time of the year and happy selling!

If you have any questions or need help implementing these recommendations, feel free to get in touch with us via chat on our website, or send us an email to [email protected].

If you are not already using LimeSpot on your online store, sign-up for your Free LimeSpot Account today!

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