295. eCommerce Website Updates for the Holiday Season

Today we’re getting into some of the nitty-gritty things I recommend you add to your to-do list to prepare for Q4 in your eCommerce business. More specifically, website updates that you should make to optimize for the holiday shopping season and make the most of every website visitor you’re lucky enough to bring to your website. 

Prefer to listen to the episode? Click here.

Now we’re going to be talking about 6 different things you can do to optimize your website for the holiday season. In a perfect world, you will do all of these. That’s part of the reason why we’re talking about this in September so you can start working on these things NOW. 

But like I always tell you, if you can’t do everything pick and choose the ones that make the most sense for your business and will have the biggest impact with the least amount of effort on your part.

Cross-Sells & Bundles

There are only 3 ways to make more money in your eCommerce business. Bring in new customers, get your existing customers to come back more often, or get them to spend more when they’re already on your website. 

As I’m sure you know, it’s a lot easier to get people who are already in the mood to shop to spend more than it is to get them shop in the first place. That’s why you go into Target for one thing and come out spending $150. It’s why grocery stores have impulse fixture at the cash wrap. It’s why McDonald’s always asked, do you want fries with that and then just started selling combo meals with a chance to supersize it. I’m glad they stopped that because I do not need to be eating a super size fries. 

You have to create the same experience on your website. The way you do that is through cross-sells, and bundles. 

The Best Way to Implement Cross-Sells

How exactly you implement this really come down to your product assortment.

If you have one product that you want to offer everyone, or a handful of best-selling products that you want to offer everyone based on what they purchased – for example – everyone who buys from category A gets cross-sell A and everyone who buys from category B gets cross-sell B – that works best as a post-purchase cross-sell. You can use a tool like ReConvert for that. My affiliate link will get you 10% off for life. I’ll stick a link in the show notes for you. 

If you want to offer a product that is a direct compliment to a specific product – for example – someone buys a handbag and you want to sell them the matching wallet – that you’d want to do as a cross-sell after they add the initial product to their cart. This is the ideal way when you have a wide assortment of product and need to make those cross-sells really specific. 

You can also add cross-sells after someone hits the start checkout button. This isn’t quite as a specific as the per-product cross-sell, but still gives you more flexibility compared to the post-purchase cross-sell. 

In any case, you can get pretty specific with these if you need to, but I also don’t want you to waste a bunch of time setting up 100s of different cross-sell campaigns. So I would as general as you can based on your product assortment. 

The Best Way to Implement Bundles

Cross-sells are great for giving the customer the option to pair items together but bundles are a great way to remove the decision from the consumer and make it easier on them. If cross-sells are the do you want fries with that, bundles are the pre-set combo meals. 

Again, how exactly you create your bundles will depend on your product assortment, but you want to really think through how your typical customer shops and create bundles that match that behavior. Don’t try and change their behavior through the bundle. 

For example, if you sell jewelry and you notice that the majority of your customers who buy multiple items generally shop within the same category. They buy multiple necklaces, OR multiple earrings but don’t really buy the matching necklace and earring – then it’s unlikely they’ll do so just because you offer it in a bundle. 

Instead, maybe you put together a bundle of necklaces that work really well together for layering. Or bracelets that are perfect for stacking. Same with rings. Look at the existing behavior of your customers and create bundles that match that behavior. The goal is to get more people to make that same bulk buying decision, not change the way people buy. 

Bundles also don’t have to necessarily be a mix of different products, maybe it’s just a multi-unit pack of the same item. More like a bulk pricing deal. Just like boxers and men’s undershirts. 3-packs, 6-packs, etc. 

I also recommend you lean toward pre-made bundles vs. build your own if possible. In most cases, the pre-made bundles will convert better than the build-your-own because it’s easier for the customer. Yes, that will likely mean you will have to have more bundles to accommodate different customers, but it’s worth the extra effort. And there’s nothing that says you can’t also offer a build-your-own for those customers who truly want that. People like me. 

When you’re building out these bundles, just make sure they make sense. For example, a student of mine who sells candles, her scents are bundled up in different themes. She’s got one that’s all food scents, another that’s more masculine scents, she’s got her best-sellers bundled together, etc. 

Bundles are also a great way to move stale inventory. If you’ve got something that just isn’t selling as well as you’d hoped, bundle it with a bestseller. Consumers will spend more for the sake of getting a deal – even if they didn’t intend to buy that second item. It’s the same concept of customers adding more to their cart so they don’t have to pay for shipping. It just is the way that it is. 

My Favorite Cross-Sell & Bundle Apps for eCommerce

You can also check out episode 49. How to Increase Your AOV with cross-sells and upsells for some inspiration and details on the cross-sell strategy. And if you do nothing else that we talk about today, please do this one. Cross-sell and bundles are not just for holiday time – this a tried and true strategy to increase sales on your website all year long.

Gift Guides

Gift guides are one of my favorite things to do during the holiday season. Not only is it great for the customer, helping them find what they need as quickly as possible, but it’s really great for SEO too. If you’ve ever heard me talk about creating gift guides before than you know I want you to keep this page up all year round. You don’t have to have it in your navigation menu, but I want you to keep it published so it stays indexed and grows in age. The longer a URL exists, the better it’s reputation. 

NOw, if you’re a one-product store or have a really small assortment, it might not make sense to have a gift guide landing page. In that case, I recommend you create a blog post or posts instead. In that case, you’re going to create a post like Best Gifts for [Person Your Gift is Good For] and then feature your product in that post. You can create multiple posts for the different people your product would make a good gift for. Then you can just update it each year and republish it so it has a new date. 

If you have a wide assortment of product, then you can create a gift guide landing page. I generally recommend you stick to 5-7 gift categories. I usually do 2-5 personality or people categories and then 3 price point categories. 

For example, gifts for Moms, for Teaches, for Music Lovers, or for Bookworms.

You’ll want each of these to link to specific collection or categories of products that are labeled as gift for [person or personality] or gifts under [price point]. You’ll want these product collections to stay published as well. 

However you create these, it makes it really easy to create email marketing campaigns and social posts around these different product curations. 

Collections

As mentioned, when you’re creating a gift guide, you need to have collections or categories that correlate directly with those gift guides. But there might be some other collections you’ll need to create. 

If you have holiday-specific items, I would put them all in a collection together. If your Black Friday collection is only going to be on specific items, make sure you have a separate Black Friday collection. 

If you plan on creating any unique product curations to promote in email or on social, consider creating collections specifically for them as well to make it really easy to direct your customers to them. 

For example, maybe you want to curate products based on some pop-culture references or TV shows. Like a gift guide for each of the characters in Friends or Schitt’s Creek for example. You don’t necessarily want that as part of your gift guide, because it won’t help you much from an SEO perspective over the long term, but building a mini-marketing campaign around it could be super fun. Or maybe you want to do something related to the astrological sun signs. 

If you don’t have enough products to fill an entire collection, maybe you just want to do one item per person, or sign, then I would do it as a blog post instead. 

Like your gift guide, any of the evergreen collections you create, you’ll want them to stay published all year, even if you do remove them from your navigation bar after the holiday season. The longer a URL exists on your website, the better reputation it will have. 

Category Merchandising

You’ll also want to take a look at your category merchandising. In most cases, the default sort on a product collection is bestselling, which means your best-selling products will always be at the top of that collection. 

This is usually the best option. But if you bring in a lot of seasonal merchandise, you may want to flip that default sort to new arrivals during the holiday season to make sure they get as much attention as possible. 

You’ll also want to make sure that any sold out items are being moved to the bottom of the collection or being removed as quickly as possible. There is nothing worse than having a customer click through to a collection and seeing the top 3-6 products all sold out. It’s just not a good look and will make your customer question whether or not you’re legit, have inventory, or if you’re going out of business. 

This is also a great time to implement filters if you haven’t already. Any way that they can easily drill down into your parent collections to find what they’re looking for, is a good move. 

Navigation Bar

Once you’ve got your gift guide and collections situated, you’ll want to make sure people can actually find them. The easiest way to do that is to update your navigation bar. 

For 99% of you, all you have to do is add one top-level link to your navigation menu. You can call it holiday shop, or something like that. 

Underneath that, I’d have a link to your gift guide, and then links to the individual categories or collections that you created for your campaign. 

Don’t make this super complicated, but you do want it to be easy for the customer to find what they’re looking for. 

If your theme has a mega menu, this should make it pretty easy to organize everything. If you have the chance to feature something with a photo in your mega menu, you can use that to direct them to the gift guide, or you can send them straight to a bundle or a best seller. 

As long as you approach it the mindset of how do I get them where they need to go in as few clicks as possible, you’ll be good to go. 

And if you haven’t already moved your about and contact us links to your footer, please do that too. Especially if you don’t have room to add a holiday link there.

Home Page

This is the going to be the first impression most website visitors have when they come to your site, so you want to make sure it’s optimized to get them where they want to go. 

Your top banner should feature whatever the most important thing for your strategy. That might be a specific product, it might be a specific collection, it might be your holiday gift guide. Whatever it is, make sure it’s specific and has shopping intent. No, fluffy, flowery language. 

And you’re likely going to swap this out during the season depending on the promotions you have going on, inventory adjustments, etc. 

Depending on the breadth of your product assortment and your focus for the season, you may have more holiday-specific things further down the page as well. Maybe you have your holiday-specific collection in the top banner and then feature your gift guide further down the page for example. 

You might feature the same collections and products you have featured on your home page right bow, but you update your graphics to give them a holiday and gift-giving vibe. 

There is no perfect or one-size-fits-all all holiday home page for eCommerce stores. It’s going to depend on your specific needs. But you want to make sure it’s intentionally set up for the holiday shopper. 

Check out episode 169 of the podcast to learn more about getting your homepage holiday-ready

Recap

The 6 website updates you should make for the holiday season.

• Cross-sells & bundles
• Gift guides
• Collections
• Navigation bar
• Home page

Ideally, I want you to do all of these things, but if you can’t for some reason, here’s the minimum I recommend. 

Cross-sells and/or bundles: because this is an eCommerce no-brainer and everyone should be doing it. I hate “should-ing” people, but this is right up there with email marketing. 

Gift Guides: If you can’t necessarily get the gift guide page done you should at least have the collections. 

Collections: You have to manage the out-of-stock items, but if you can’t do the filters right now, make that a Q1 2025 priority. 

Navigation Bar: Whatever bare minimum you have in terms of a gift guide page or gift collections, make sure it’s featured in your navigation bar. Even if it’s only price point categories. 

Home Page: The minimum here is your hero image, whatever you have above the fold. If everything else on your home page stays the same, that’s fine, but make sure that top banner is featuring whatever you’re focusing on for the holiday season.  Whatever bare minimum you have in terms of a gift guide page or gift collections, make sure it’s featured in your navigation bar. Even if it’s only price point categories.