Magento Christmas Store: Preparing For Winter Holidays

Below, we will show you how to prepare your Magento website for Christmas and other winter holidays. Do you know that it is possible to use the Christmas time to improve your conversion rate and make your customers more loyal? The following post discusses visual changes as well as various performance and marketing improvements vital during the holiday season. And you can easily implement almost everything via appropriate Magento extension.

9 of top 10 ecommerce spending days of 2014 took place in December. Of course, there were Cyber Monday and Green Monday among them, but other 7 days are related to Christmas and winter holidays. This fact will certainly give you a better understanding of why it is important to turn your ecommerce website into a Magento Christmas shop.

The biggest mistake merchants make worldwide is the inability to understand how much time is required for the holiday preparations. They often start the improvements to late and face tons of problems, such as inability to ship goods in time or a dramatic increase of downtime caused by an expanded number of visitors.

Thus, it is extremely important to start your strategy and execution planning before the rush of traffic hits your Magento website. Furthermore, it is also necessary to test all your improvements before it happens. Since now it is the best time to begin your winter holiday preparations, let’s check some basic visual improvements first.

Magento Christmas Store: Visual Changes

As we mentioned above, it is possible to prepare your Magento website to the holiday season with the help of extensions. Magento Connect provides several reliable solutions which changes the design of your ecommerce store by adding some Christmas elements.

Holiday Season Effects

This Magento extension enables snow falling on your website, decorative lights shining everywhere, and Santa Claus walking on pages of the store. The Holiday Season Effects plugin offers easy-to-manage configurations, so you will prepare your online storefront for Christmas and other winter holidays without any help from third party developers.

Install the extension and enable snow effects, Santa Claus, various header and footer decorations, the New Year / Christmas Wish feature from your admin. The module supports a lot of major basic Magento templates and does not affect any default features. You can purchase Holiday Season Effects for only $9 with included installation support.

Download Holiday Season Effects Magento Extension

Festive Season Extension

With this Magento module, you ecommerce website will look drenched with Christmas fervor. As an admin user, you will get the ability to create various decorative effects for your store without affecting its performance. Choose any text or images, upload custom header and footer to attract your visitors increasing conversion and loyalty. Festive Season Extension is absolutely free and can be used to make your store chic during other holidays.

Download Festive Season Extension

Templates and Themes

There are some Christmas Magento themes available on Template Monster. Both cost $179 and looks well. Alternatively, you can hire someone to create a custom Christmas theme or look on other marketplaces.

Please note that changing your current design via a new theme requires more time and effort than installing an extension. Besides, it can negatively affect some of already existing features. Thus, we don’t recommend to change your current theme, but if you are willing to implement this approach while preparing your Magento store to Christmas, follow this link:

Christmas Magento Themes

Magento Christmas Store: Marketing Improvements

Now, when your Magento Store has a stunning Christmas look, we can discuss further improvements. Chances are, you’ve already installed some marketing extensions, buy we will show you, where to find more tools.

Discounts and Promotions

The winter holidays are the time when people buy presents, give presents, and wait for presents. You can easily help them with all these acts with the help of proper Magento extensions. Thus, having installed a third-party discount module, you provide your visitors with the ability to purchase more gifts. Moreover, your discount is a present you give them for Christmas. To get the best possible Magento plugins related to discounts and promotions, check this post:

The Best Magento Extensions For Extended Discounts And Promotion Rules

Gift Registry

Providing your customers with the ability to use a gift registry is another vital improvement which is extremely important during the winter holiday season. Keep in mind that you can help them with getting a gift by installing a gift registry plugin. And this gift will be purchase on your website. To discover the best gift registry extensions, follow the link below:

Best Gift Registry Magento Extensions

Loyalty and Referral Campaigns

Although you should always make your customers more and more loyal, not only during the winter holidays, we insists that this process plays a substantial role in turning your ecommerce website into a Magento Christmas Store. Your visitors still believe in miracles, and your storefront can both boost or drop this belief depending on a strategy you choose. Thus, we recommend you to choose a robust loyalty extension among tools listed here:

Loyalty and Referral Campaigns Magento Extensions

Other Marketing Extensions

You can find other useful marketing tools here: Magento Marketing Extensions. They serve for different purposes, but will be useful during your Christmas marketing campaign.

Magento Christmas Store: Performance

Ecommerce websites always experience the increase of traffic before Christmas. Thus, there are two reasons to improve your performance before winter holidays. First of all, you will provide your visitors with a faster store and as a result better user experience. The second important reason is the necessity to prevent your website from being down because of too massive user influx. If you are going to optimize the performance of your Magento website to prepare it for the winter holidays check this guide: Magento Performance Ultimate Guide.

Magento Christmas Store: Mobile Support

The number of people shopping from their mobile devices is rapidly growing. In some countries, mobile shoppers surpasses desktop buyers. Thus, the Christmas mystery time is a perfect period to update your Magento website. Optimize your ads and be sure to capitalize on the the new mobile marketing channels, such as SMS, push notifications, or geolocation. If you don’t know how to make your store ready for the new trend, check this articles: How To Make Every Magento Store Responsive And Mobile Ready and Mobilegeddon Ultimate Survival Guide.

Magento Christmas Store: Inventory

Inventory is another important aspect of your Christmas preparations. The quantity of goods you sell can be drained too fast and you will lose extra profit. Therefore, we recommend you to pay attention to the similar period during previous years, current trends, and our competitors while trying to calculate a perfect stock level. In case of multichannel ecommerce, it is necessary to link all your channels together in order to prevent promising product you can’t deliver.

Magento Christmas Store: Payment, Fulfillment, and Shipping

You should optimize your payment, fulfillment, and shipping systems for extra loads during the holidays: implement One Page Checkout, if you haven’t done that yet, provide full product selection, offer sufficient product information, and make sure that your buyers will receive their purchases in time. If you are offering such methods as in-store pick up, it is also necessary to provide appropriate support.

Magento Christmas Store: Customer Services

While preparing your Magento store for the Christmas period, don’t forget about customer services, since with high order volume you will also get a lot of customer inquiries. You can even get ready for the heavy demand by choosing better customer service options: Top Helpdesk Services and Tools.

Magento Christmas Store: Marketing Strategy

Since the strategy you successfully implemented last year can be less effective this year, it should be carefully analyzed and refined before using it again. Since every business has its unique requirements, there are tons of various marketing strategies. At the same time, specialists state that personalization is among very effective marketing instruments, creative approach sells, buy buttons still rocks, and holiday campaign calendar works. It is also a good idea to get new traffic sources before Christmas. May be, it’s time to conquer social media or improve SEO right now.

Magento Christmas Store: Plan B

You should be always ready for force majeure situations especially when your traffic rises during the winter holidays.In order to prevent different troubles, it is necessary to:

• find alternative suppliers (may be even from other retailers);
• get a plan how to sell alternative products;
• provide discounts or other compensations for later delivery;
• create email templates with apologies which can be easily personalized saving your time.

Conclusion

As you can see, turning your ecommerce website into a Magento Christmas Store is a complex procedure which requires a lot of time and effort. You can still perform a lot of preparation for the Christmas season without any help from third parties, but it is extremely important to start working right now.