Welcome to peak season everyone!
No need to panic, here at GNOC we are here to help guide you through peak season. With Black Friday around the corner and Christmas only a month away, it's important your eCommerce store is ready for the busiest period of the year. This may be the chance for your company to make the most revenue, lots of sales and build strong relationships with your customers.
We have a checklist list of five key things your business must focus on to be as successful as possible in this peak period…
There are lots of key dates coming up in these next few months, with opportunities to do lots of amazing promotions of your products and drive sales. Having a set plan of your key dates and which dates you are going to promote products is KEY.
Some dates you may want to consider are:
This is a crucial step for the peak period, as you must try to accurately forecast your business's demand for the peak period to ensure you know which products are most likely to sell fast. You can use previous years data to try and predict your fast- and slow-moving stock. This is a key step as you want to ensure you don’t have any stockouts.
Running out of stock in your busiest periods can cause a huge loss of sales and revenue, so you want to ensure you order enough stock of your most popular items.
A website is the backbone to any eCommerce business and therefore it is crucial your website not only looks good in this peak period but also operates smoothly for your customers. With your website being due more traffic, you want to ensure it won't crash or slow down, causing customers to leave the site and cancel their transactions.
You need to ensure you optimise your imagery, button placements, navigation bar, site speed and payment options. Customers want the purchasing process to be as easy as possible, otherwise they may decide not to shop with you. If your website runs fast and is optimised as much as possible, customers may decide to shop with you again, building brand loyalty.
Make sure you have a strong marketing strategy for your peak season to ensure you are reaching as many customers as possible. You should know exactly which promotions you are going to be doing, which seasonal products you are going to bring out, and which campaigns will be going ahead over this period.
Ensure you have high quality, engaging content planned that focuses on your promotions and campaigns and have these scheduled across the Christmas period. Make sure your content is adapted to reach different audiences on each platform, for example: more video focused entertaining content for TikTok, and more product focused content for Instagram and Facebook.
Your order fulfilment and returns process are two MAJOR factors to having a successful peak period and balancing these as well as the rest of your business may seem daunting. Keeping up with a surge in orders and returns may feel like a lot, and this is where 3PL comes into it. By allowing a third-party company to handle your stock in their warehouse they will then pick, pack, and ship your items to your customers, quickly and efficiently to ensure your customers are kept as happy as possible.
Your business may see a huge surge in returns over the Christmas period, but don’t fear, your chosen 3PL will offer reverse logistics to help you handle these. Partnering with a 3PL can save your business so much time, as well as huge warehousing and staffing costs, and also ensure there are fewer mistakes made and therefore happier customers.
Here at GNOC, we want to help your business during the peak period by taking care of your fulfilment and logistics. We are experts in fulfilment and eCommerce and therefore can help guide you and your business to be as successful as possible this Q4. Contact GNOC and let's discuss all your needs or fill out this short form today and one of our helpful team will be in touch.