Commerce Holiday Readiness Guide for 2022 | Tips & Strategies

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Even though the holiday shopping might start in November and December, eCommerce stores have already begun preparing themselves for the Holiday Season. Last holiday season, Adobe Analytics reported that sales grew by a whopping 32% from 2019 to total $188.2 billion, two years' worth of growth in one year.

Retail's eCommerce share remains high, and so does its competition. Providing easy, flexible, and convenient options will make you your shoppers' favorite shopping destination. And now is a great time to get started and make your eCommerce website holiday season ready. Let's first see some of the eCommerce trends for Holiday Season 2022.

Trends for Holiday Season 2022

1. Consider Mobile-First Ecommerce:
Opportunities for mobile shopping or m-commerce are plentiful. Sales of retail m-commerce reached $359.32 billion in 2021, an increase of 15.2% over the previous year. By 2025, these sales should more than double to reach $728.28 billion and account for 44.2% of retail e-commerce sales in the U.S., So users are most likely to prefer a mobile-friendly website for a better shopping experience.

2. Ecommerce landscape gets more competitive:
A recent study predicted that e-commerce would account for 20.4% of global retail sales by 2022, up from 10% five years ago. And then there are large players like Amazon and Alibaba. Cloud, commerce, and logistics capabilities backed by seamless, elegant shopping experiences can fend off these rivals as well as many others.

3. Rising threat from cyber attacks:
Companies have lost more than $20 billion in 2021 to eCommerce fraud. eCommerce websites are often targeted by DDoS attacks, automated bots that use stolen credit card numbers to complete transactions, and e-skimming attacks, which use malware to steal customers' personal information during checkout. The abandonment rate of shopping carts is already at 70% or higher, so retailers must strengthen their defenses without increasing customer friction.

4. Holiday purchases come early:
According to Salesforce research, it is estimated that many consumers will start their Christmas and Thanksgiving shopping earlier in September to beat price hikes and tap on the huge discounts. So retailers must gear up their eCommerce websites for an early Holiday Shopping Season.

This blog outlines strategies for overcoming the challenges of preparing ecommerce websites for major events, whether it’s a one-day super sale, or an entire holiday season. Here are 5 best practices for maximizing eCommerce success during the 2022 holiday season and beyond.

Steps for Preparing for the 2022 Holiday Season

1. Prepare for increased Holiday traffic
Last year, some of the industry giants were caught off guard during the exceptionally heavy traffic seen during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If websites can't handle the surge in traffic and transaction volumes that Cyber Weekend is known for, fickle customers won't hesitate to make their purchases elsewhere. One site's outage is another site's opportunity, and speedy sites get the sales. So, prepare your eCommerce website to prevent downtime and the associated financial and reputational harm.

The first step is to create a forecast of your capacity needs based on the growth of traffic and sales volumes over the last 3 to 5 years. Then, depending on your projected peak traffic levels, execute load testing on both internal and external systems.

2. Prioritize customer’s mobile experience
43% of the Black Friday sales happened via smartphones in 2021, which is a 2% increase from 2020. To boost purchase confidence, beautiful product images and 3D renderings, as well as robust product videos, can be used to stimulate interest and enhance visual commerce. Another critical factor is website performance. Test the site speed on different mobile devices to ensure your customers don't face any glitches in their shopping experience. Retailers should optimize the website performance for different device types and network bandwidth to enhance the customer experience.

3. Ensure you are protected against DDoS attacks & secure the website
Preparing for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks from malicious actors that seek to flood your hosting server with traffic from compromised devices and networks as part of disaster-proofing your hosting infrastructure is essential. As per reports, DDoS attacks jumped by 75% in Q4 2021 compared to the previous three months.

4. Adopting the right CDN approach – Multi CDN
Several online platforms like Shopify, Discord, Acko and GitLab went down a few days back for users in a few countries as one of the CDN providers suffered an outage. CDN providers are vulnerable to outages, causing downtime for all website owners who rely solely on their services whenever these services experience a glitch.

5. Application Performance Auditing & Tuning
Application can be audited during the no-peak season like August and September and then tuned for performance optimization. You first need to review your current website and understand what the bottlenecks are. Make sure your website works in par or far better than your competitors.

How can N7 and Nvizion Solutions help in ensuring your Ecommerce website is Holiday ready?

Nvizion always prepares you for the Holiday season by optimising your application to maximise sales and handle most concurrent users to place an order. We not only review the site but also preempt the issues, fine-tune the application and make it ready for the holiday. We understand the architecture and tune the commerce for your needs and requirements.

N7- The Nitrogen Platform is a new age AI/ ML powered performance disruptor. It uses features like journey optimization, predictive caching, JavaScript acceleration, and human & BOT detection, which sets it apart from legacy CDN players and gives your user the digital experience you always wanted them to have.