Elevate eCommerce CX & boost Black Friday conversions
Black Friday is just around the corner, and with the peak sales period now stretching over a longer period, many deals are set to go live as early as October. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Holiday Season present huge opportunities for eCommerce businesses but failing to prepare adequately can result in lost revenue and long-term damage to your brand’s reputation.
The good news is that it’s not too late – by testing now and focusing on delivering optimal Digital CX around the clock, there’s still time to boost conversion rates and prevent lost revenue during this peak holiday period.
Seven-Step Plan for Holiday Peak Season Success
Follow these steps to eliminate DCX friction and website errors, and maximise online revenue this peak holiday period.
1. Integrate Load Testing Early The earlier you incorporate Load Testing into your holiday season planning process, the better. Many businesses mistakenly leave load testing as a last-minute task, but a more proactive approach ensures you can resolve issues without last-minute pressure. Retesting after fixes is essential for success.
2. Define Realistic Testing Targets Before diving into testing, define what success looks like based on real-world customer experiences. Understand how users interact with your site and build your tests around that knowledge. Use data from past performance to develop realistic test models that simulate actual customer journeys, from landing pages to promotions and checkout – including realistic mixes of journeys and drop-off ratios.
3. Measure Current Capacity Assess your site’s current capacity to handle traffic. Look at how your site performed in previous peak periods, including journey delivery times and error rates. If you plan to launch a stripped-down version of your site for Black Friday, Load Test that version in isolation to understand its performance limits.
4. Test Often We recommend Load Testing months ahead of peak season and using the results to establish a baseline and to identify areas for improvement. Regular testing, with increased frequency leading up to the final code lockdown, will help you make incremental changes and verify improvements.
5. Lockdown Code on Time Start your code lockdown at least six weeks before peak to ensure stability. This timeline allows you to implement final changes, such as Black Friday sections and deal codes, before freezing the code. Consider reducing non-essential functionality to optimise performance and ensure a smooth experience for mobile users.
6. Retest After Code Freeze Two to four weeks before peak season, retest your live system to ensure the final environment is performing as expected. Testing in a staging environment is not enough; real-world performance on the live system is critical for success.
7. Focus on ongoing Customer Experience 24/7 After all the preparation, ensure that your customers continue experiencing a seamless journey from landing page to checkout. Gathering Digital CX Intelligence for key journeys 24/7— especially on mobile — will help you catch any issues before they impact users. Test your site using real-world scenarios to avoid unexpected problems with real browsers and on genuine OS.
With this plan in place, you can confidently approach the holiday season, ensuring your eCommerce store is ready to deliver an exceptional Digital Customer Experience, prevent lost revenue and safeguard your brand.
Free up staff resources with an extension to your team
In reality you probably don’t have the resources, time or capacity to plan, prepare and test for seasonal peaks. A fully-managed service offers the benefits of experienced test experts acting as an extension of your technical team. This expands your resource, time, experience and not to mention test capacity – as and when you require it – and frees up internal teams to focus on business objectives.
For a more detailed guide on the seven step process download our eBook here.
