Five tips to ensure your website is ready for Christmas

With over £6.8 billion spent online in the UK in the 2010 Christmas season and predictions that this will increase again this year, you need to be sure your website is up to the job. We’ve compiled five simple tips that will help website owners increase the number of Christmas visitors who become shoppers.

TIP 1: Get your FAQs into shape
Do you know your top 10 customer support enquiries from December 2010? Analysing last year’s Christmas support enquiries is a rich source of customer insight that you can preempt this year and answer on your frequently asked questions page—before people contact support. Once you’ve identified the top 10 check that these are answered in your FAQ; a simple copy change can not only reduce support enquiries, but increase your conversions, as most visitors will just leave for a competitor than bother to get in touch.

TIP 2: Build trust with your returns policy
This is best practice for any time of the year. Having a clearly written and prominently sign-posted returns policy gives visitors confidence that if their Auntie doesn’t like that Manchester Utd shirt—and why wouldn’t she—it’s easy to return. We recommend including a prominent—read: not in the footer—link to the returns policy on every single page and especially in the basket. Also ensure the copy is easy to understand. take a look at this returns policy from Boden for inspiration.

TIP 3: “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” (please don’t)
Remember the arctic conditions in the UK last year? Remember just how badly deliveries were affected? While none of us can change the weather, clearly communicating with site visitors and customers what’s happening to deliveries is a priority for online retailers should arctic weather ensue. Direct Commerce covered what effect the snow had on parcels and mailings, and you can read that article here.
 
TIP 4: Test website performance
Slow load times are a major source of frustration for users at any time of the year, and at Christmas, things only get worse. How did your website perform last Christmas? Can it handle this year’s load and peak traffic? How stressful were you when visitors could not order?

This year you don’t need to wait and find out how your website will cope, use one of the free or low-cost load simulators to see how it performs and make those technical changes now that will help you cope, both technically and emotionally!

TIP 5: Run a gifting usability test
If you’re regularly running usability tests with people in your target market, now is the time to get feedback from users who are not. For example, think about a 20-year-old male buying perfume for his mother on a site targeted at 40 to 50-year-old women. Running a gifting usability test using a service like whatusersdo.com can give valuable insight into how to design the Christmas area of your site for people buying gifts.

Lee Duddell is product director and founder of online user experience testing company Whatusersdo.