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If the answer is, “We’re working on it right now”, you’re probably a little too late to make a huge difference this year. Am I raining on your parade when I say such things? If I am, I apologize… but it’s the truth. Let me explain…

Internet business and ecommerce is one of trends. I noted today to a co-worker that across most ecommerce sites I monitor, there are certain times throughout the year where internet users/shoppers tend to ‘unplug’, and traffic to these sites goes down accross the board (about 25% this time around). In turn, business is slow(er). Now, I’m not sure if this is the case across all types of sites, but it’s a definite trend in ecommerce and online shopping. An example of a time where things are consistently slower would be during the summer months. However, there are certain weeks or long weekends during the summer where things go almost totally black. These are generally the holiday weekends of memorial day, 4th of july and labor day which to me, is not suprising at all… People go away to the beach or elsewhere, and rightly so, forget about the internet and how addicted they’ve become to it.

Another obvious trend, and the purpose of this post, is that from labor day on through the holiday season, things really begin to pick up again. That 25% I noted lost during the summer is back in full force, and traffic across most sites looks to be on the verge of moving higher. Which has been a common trend for years now.

This, my friends, is the power of the holiday season online and the reason why you should be ready for it, today. So, I ask again… are you pepared?

It is during these slow summer months (and early spring) that all serious ecommerce site owners should be gearing up for this wave of traffic, which happens to be full of qualified buyers. It’s the perfect time to be making changes to your site, adding functionality, and tracking the results. Putting such tasks off until after summer is not a good idea. Technically, your site should be set and ready to sell in full force by mid September or so. The goal of every ecommerce site should be to outperform the year before. If you’ve been working on getting more traffic to you URL over the last year, that should indeed do the trick, but only to a degree.

What many people do not realize about doing business online is that a lot of sites sell, in spite of their efforts. What do I mean by that? Well, even though you might be doing some decent business online, chances are, you could be doing more. Getting more traffic is only one part of that equation… Another very important part is making site improvements which include things like testing usability, adding functionality via the back end (better shipping functionality, more streamlined checkout process, etc), making tweaks to the user-interface to draw more attention to important areas, implementing effective calls-to-action, etc… Have you been doing all of these things this summer?

Unfortunately, a large percentage of people seeling online have not been. Their only focus is ‘more traffic’. Like I said, more traffic will bring more business, but only to the degree of your overall conversion percentage. By increasing the effectiveness of your site at turning conversions, you’re also exponentially increasing the amount of success your site can see. Because not only are you now getting more traffic, you are converting at a higher rate than ever before. The result in eventual sales could very well be dramatic and push your site to an entire new level. And such is the beauty of ecommerce.

I often refer to building an ecommerce site as starting out with a small snowball on top of a very large hill that is called “Money Spent Online”. The amount of money spent online across the globe will only rise and in doing so, our snowy hill will indefinitely grow into a mountain the size of Everest, or bigger. It’s on top of this pile we place our newly formed snowball (or ecom site) and start it rolling down the hill. The further it rolls, the bigger it gets. But, The more sticky we make the snowball, the quicker it attracts more snow unto itself and the faster it grows. Putting up an effective ecommerce site that is search engine friendly while also providing value to your customers, is truely a ’snowball’. Unless major mistakes are made via customer service, order fulfillment, etc… the snowball WILL grow. This is true strictly because the market for your product online will increase over time (in general) as will the saturation of your site within the search engines. This formula leads to definite growth. But at what rate will it grow? Well, that is entirely up to you and your efforts. Sitting there, ‘watching and leaving things as is’ will show you a very slow growth rate, but growth nontheless. However, it’s the little extra things you do to increase your conversion rates that will cause your ecommerce site to really start ’snowballing’ into more sales and conversions. By making such changes, not only will you provide a better overall experience to your users, but your business will grow at a rate exponentially faster than if your only tactic is to increase traffic and hope people buy.

So… if you didn’t get on it this year and your site isn’t better than it was last year, be sure to take this into account for the next holiday season. Because one thing is for sure: Next year there will be more people buying online than there are this year, and your potential to capture more sales will only be higher. Take advantage of that fact as soon as you can and as often as you can.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Marketing, SEO/SEM, The Internet, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.