Kidson Talks | The E-commerce Chemist

Right, its getting close so what do you need to do? You haven’t started yet? Thought so. So lets get cracking and here’s a few things to get on with or you can use it as a basic guide. It’s generic as every business is different and every product type moves differently. This post leans more towards your advertising and a little about inventory and website functionality. I am going to start my Christmas shopping this month, and I buy EVERYTHING on-line, and about 50% on eBay.

Week 1

Gather Data – Make sure you have the necessary data from last year October to December including your pay per click campaign statistics from last year. This has to include your website statistics, ROI, traffic sources, best keywords Google Analytics’s can provide this basic data if installed correctly, including basically what made your revenue.

Review Product Launch Dates – Many companies schedule launch of products in time for the Christmas season, especially consumer electronics. Make sure you advertising picks up on these trends if your product is relevant.

Gather Competitive Intelligence – know your enemy in the battle for Christmas! What paid campaigns did they use last year? What keywords are they ‘buying’ now? Does your paid search campaign match up?

Prepare a calendar of events – make sure you and your advertising/website team know what’s going to happen and when.

Week 2

Prepare your website for the new season – evaluate the ease of navigation, can your item be found in 3 clicks? Is your shipping information clear and above the fold? (above the bottom of your browser window, on initial viewing of the page)

Determine your up-sell opportunities, you will have related products to your main Christmas sellers.

Have you tried setting up on eBay to increase your reach?

Test your seasonal landing pages.

Re organise your product inventory, make sure there is room for your seasonal items. Taking off your lower selling items during this period to squeeze in more popular items is OK. Most catalogue companies do this to make way for Christmas. Put keywords like ‘Christmas gifts’ and ‘gifts for her’ within the HTML and keywords of your site. Remember gifts is what its all about now.

Week 3

Prepare for launch! Once Halloween is over its time for Christmas so you need to make sure you can flick on your advertising methods, be it standard advertising, marketplaces or pay per click quickly. Test your campaigns intensively and monitor your competitors for change. Test your website, and remove any dead links or fix broken pages. Set budgets wisely. You supposed to be making more money at Christmas not loosing it on excessive advertising!
Week 4

Launch your campaign. You will need to make sure the search engines know what’s going on so have you updated your sitemaps? Once November hits is all about Christmas, you need to make sure your Christmas and gift keywords have been indexed. Once your campaign has been running for a week you will be able to fine tune it in the first week of November.

November Edition Posted