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We know you’ll be busy getting ready for the Black Friday and Christmas retail period, maybe even starting to ramp up online promotions.
With everything there is to think about, the last thing you want is worry over whether your eCommerce platform can cope. Taking a few minutes to read this article, could save you a lot of heartache down the line.
There are three crucial things you need to have in place for a worry free festive period:
Robust hosting framework
The first is a hosting framework that is robust enough to accommodate increased site traffic load. This usually means a platform that can autoscale, as opposed to one that needs to be manually viewed and increased dependent on demand. Site speed and performance rely on your hosting server being able to behave effectively under pressure.
9xb work in partnership with industry leading, multi-award winning company Amazon Web Services to provide cloud hosting solutions that are state of the art, reliable, fast and secure. By carefully managing our hosting network, we are proud to have delivered uptime in excess of 99.99% consistently over the past 5 years.
Flexible and reliable eCommerce platform
The eCommerce platform you choose as the foundation for your store could make all the difference when it comes to effectively running and managing seasonal promotions.
During busy promotional periods, you’ll need the ability to regularly update compelling offers, merchandise your store, highlight promotions throughout the site, apply discounts and more.
A content led eCommerce platform will allow your administrators or marketing team to easily make changes to the front end via an intuitive content management system, ensuring a great experience for your customers as they look to secure a great deal.
9xb’s enterprise level platform, Peracto, supports the presentation of product data and rich brand content in a single solution. With a powerful CMS integrated into the heart of the platform, enriched content can be seamlessly combined with comprehensive ecommerce functionality.
Dedicated and responsive support
With online sales growing at a faster pace than ever, running an eCommerce store comes with significant risk. Most eCommerce platform providers sell you an out of the box solution, get you up and running and then send you on your way. Beyond that, support is limited. You may even end up paying through the nose for additional development work via a third party.
9xb is an eCommerce agency, offering marketing and technical support alongside our market leading platform. Our experts work with many big name clients to support them year round.
It’s our job to predict and prepare for periods of heightened demand, advise on strategies and campaigns to drive traffic to their store, and optimise the store for conversion.
Knowing when a client plans to send out a promotion to their database, means we can ensure that promotion is visible throughout the site and test the site to identify any potential problems.
For an event like Black Friday, which is now lasting for up to a week and responsible for a significant proportion of annual sales, careful planning and forethought is essential.
And if it does go wrong...
One 9xb client learnt the hard way, when their previous platform turned a Black Friday promotion off a day early, leading to a significant loss of sales. Read the full case study.
You might think it was some custom built, antiquated platform that let them down. in fact, it was Magento, one of the most popular eCommerce platforms out there.
On a normal day, this may not cause too much damage to the business, but during peak season or a key promotion, it could potentially be devastating.
Another 9xb client, Bradford Theatres, successfully took £1.5m in ticket sales in one day, managing a 46% surge in website visitors. Read the full case study.
For more simple strategies to prevent costly hiccups and supercharge your site for customer delight, take a look at this blog, written by our search partner Algolia.
Did you know that Magento1 is soon becoming unsupported? If you're looking to transition platform, or want help running and effectively managing seasonal promotions through your online store, get in touch.
