Holiday Sales Readiness Checklist for Retailers and e-Commerce Businesses

What’s your fair share in $691.9 billion US Holiday shopping spend?

With the clock ticking on the upcoming holiday season, retailers and e-commerce shops need to be prepping now. E-Commerce growth during the US Holiday Shopping Sales 2018 season is projected to grow 15.3% from 2017 where shoppers spent $692 billion (both offl­ine and online). Here are few critical areas where businesses can evaluate their readiness and make changes now to assure they have a successful holiday sales season.

FORMULATE and IMPROVE

• Data Layer Tag Management

  Exploit Data Layer for complex tagging, understanding conversions, faster loading speeds, channel attribution and omni-channel competitive advantage.

• Custom Tracking Pixels

  Develop GDPR compliant, JavaScript custom tracking pixels for better understanding the audience, retargeting them precisely with their preferences and optimize ad budget spend.

• ETL Implementation

  Swiftly capture multi-channel data from heterogenous data sources, process and provision enriched data for real-time decision making and performing advanced analytics.

• Converting Cart Abandonments

  Cart abandonments costs e-marketers 4 Trillion Dollars. Monitoring cart abandonment events and analyzing root causes could significantly boost online revenue and retain customers.

• Audience Segmentation

  Build 360 degree audience profile using 1st, 2nd & 3rd party data captured from 100s of online, o­ine touchpoints. Improve match rates with DMP to precisely target customers.

• Omni-channel Campaign Testing

  Test your marketing campaigns for product data, campaign IDs, coupon codes, UTM parameters, web links, deep links, banners, push notifications and multi-stage web forms before launch.

• Personalized Recommendations

  Use device graphs for cross-device identity matching, offer personalized product recommendations to effectively sell, cross-sell, up-sell offerings with the knowledge of buying preferences of online visitors.

• Digital Rights Management

  Track files, licenses, relevant metadata and stay compliant with copyright restrictions on sporadically distributed media files to gain ROI, protect brand and avoid recurring penalty.

BUILD and TWEAK

• One-Click Deployment

  Launching important upgrades/ version releases? Automated Deployment is vital for e-commerce businesses with international presence and apps for different devices and platforms.

• Performance & Load Testing

  Does your App load in 2 seconds? Don’t lose hard earned customers due to lack of agility. Optimize code, run stress, load tests for optimal benchmarks in peak load trac conditions.

• Penetration & Security Testing

  210 Million fraud attack attempts in Q1 2018. Run vulnerability assessment, penetration testing and network assessment to protect PII, encrypted data from DDOS, SQL Injections & phishing.

• Cross-browser Responsiveness

  Use automated interactive cross-browser responsive testing for 1200+ mobile devices with browsers, screen sizes, operating systems and deliver consistent brand appeal to customers.

• Integration Testing

  Maximize test coverage and ensure functionality flows seamlessly across custom software, 3rd party add-ons, hardware compatibility and web-services integrations with reusable test scripts.

• Usability Testing

  Just half of e-Commerce companies run regular Usability Testing, but 60% of them are planning Conversational commerce. Usability and User Experience are keys to winning in modern e-Commerce.

• 3rd Party Add-Ons

  Add-ons or Extensions extend our ability to do more with less. Swiftly develop, implement or integrate add-ons for web, native apps, browsers or even beacons and serve, capture customers.

• Custom-Software Integration

  Go beyond off-the-shelf software automation capabilities. Extend business use-case coverage and yet retain business control with custom software integration of confidential applications systems.

ENGAGE and SERVE

• Chatbots as Support Agents

  Deploy intelligent Chatbots that are pre-programmed to serve and channelize customers’ queries. With 1000s of concurrent users flocking to your apps, Live Chats may not be of any help.

• Voice Enabled Search

  Voice Search is now 95% accurate. Implement voice search with content strategy, modified schema & structured data testing.

• Reverse Logistics – Fulfillment

  30% of all e-Commerce orders are returned. Be it Third-Party Logistics (3PL) or own fulfilment, integrate Reverse Logistics with e-Commerce to save 8.1% return handling cost of overall revenue.

MONITOR and VISUALIZE

• Application & IT Infra Monitoring

  Avoid risk of site/app crash, downtime, last minute infra provisioning. Balance load on priority pages, monitor health, have contingency plans, escalation matrix & 3rd party help.

• Digital Analytics Reporting

  MarTech Stacks offer detailed reporting on real-time campaign performance, Ads ROI, conversions, goal tracking & attribution modelling. Timely insights fuel positive growth.

• Data Analytics and Insights

  Insights-driven e-commerce companies use advanced analytical models for forecasting demand, fulfilment planning, pricing strategy, discount impact and personalized campaigns.