Twas the season before the holidays and all through the web
All the website owners were scrambling, in need of a dev
In the hopes that their stores would be created with care
To impress their customers with a touch of creative holiday flair.

The holiday season always brightens the mood. Plus, it’s the ideal time where people can go out and choose wonderful gifts for family and friends. Recently, there has been a huge spike in eCommerce sales and people have been opting to shop online rather than to go out and shop in a physical store. However, in order to keep the holiday spirit alive and to attract customers during the gift-buying seasons, you’ll want to start preparing your WooCommerce Store for the Holidays.

One of the most popular eCommerce platforms that can be extremely customizable, is WooCommerce. WooCommerce is one of the best platforms to have in terms of customization and added extensions for all your eCommerce needs- which is perfect if you’re in need of a holiday website makeover! Check out these top tips to help prepare your WooCommerce Store for the Holidays:

Create a Festive Look

Much like a physical store that needs to jazz up its look for the holidays to attract customers, so does an online store! However, with a push of a button, this can be done pretty easily. So put away the tape, wrapping paper, and don’t worry about mounting up a Christmas tree! WooCommerce makes it easy to decorate your website in a few ways- from editing background colors and fonts, adding banners, making slideshows, and even using unique ideas that you can’t find on any other eCommerce platform such as adding music or adding a countdown! You can find a plugin for almost anything!

Adding music to your site to really incorporate all the senses is such a fun way to get in the holiday spirit! Christmas Music Plugin by BDA is a free WooCommerce plugin that allows you to play jingle bells on your whole site or specific pages of your site- how neat! There’s also the pro version that you can add for $20 extra if you do not want to be limited to Jingle Bells and want to rock your site with your own music files!

Adding a countdown is also a fun way to engage your customers and to get them excited for the holidays! A countdown can also help create urgency to help facilitate the checkout process- a crowd favorite is Christmas Countdown Widget which displays good ole Saint Nick counting down the days till Christmas!

Offer Free Shipping

Who doesn’t enjoy free shipping?! Free shipping isn’t just a good deal for consumers, but it can be great for store owners too! Free shipping will boost your conversion rates as well as increase your revenue!

One way to make sure that your revenue gets increased and to sell more inventory is by offering free shipping for orders that hit a certain value. For example, “Spend $20 or more and receive free shipping on your order

This way, it will encourage customers to spend a little extra in order to secure the shipping discount! You can also include a time frame for shipping discounts. Including a time frame will put some pressure on the consumer during the checkout process to go forward with the sale. Offering free shipping is a great way to prepare your WooCommerce store for the holidays!

Catchy Email Marketing Campaigns

Do you have a call to action prepared for the busy season? If not, you’ll want to have one by incorporating email marketing campaigns! Before starting an email marketing campaign, ask yourself the top 5 important questions:
1.) What will I use as my landing page?
2.) What will the theme/ content be?
3.) Will I have a promotion plan or offer?
4.) When will I send out the email campaigns?
5.) What platform should I use for my email campaign? Hint: Our favorite is Mailchimp!

Once you have your goals set, you’re ready to take off! Email marketing campaigns are beneficial in that they allow you to keep in contact with your customers. They most likely signed up for emails because they loved the product- so giving them that extra attention will keep them as loyal fans of your products and will allow them to receive any new updates on products or special discounts. It will also allow you to gain feedback from your customers in the form of reviews or success stories! Plus, email marketing is a great way to have a cheaper form of marketing – it’s free and helps reduce the rate of having to pay for ads.

Include a Seasonal Sale or Discount

What better way to incentivize potential customers than with a holiday discount? One of the most popular ways to promote discounts is by incorporating discount pop-ups on your site! Including pop-ups is a must-have in order to catch your customer’s attention and to introduce your holiday discounts! Some themes will create pop-ups for you, but if you aren’t going to use a theme then including a pop-up to keep your customers engaged will really help to boost those sales! Pops-ups can be used directly on your homepage or during the checkout process.

Having a pop-up on the initial homepage is a great way to promote any holiday discounts that you might have, as well as to ask for an email to send additional discounts to. This will ensure that if the customer ends up leaving the site, they’ll at least be added to the email list to receive more discounts and hopefully influence them to go back on the site to buy. Coupon Box for WooCommerce does a fantastic job creating these pop-ups for your site and it’s easy to install.

Exit pop-ups are also a great way to ensure that the sale is made and to lessen the impact of “cart abandonment.” Cart abandonment is when the user has a full cart of goodies to buy but ends up exiting the page and not buying. To prevent this from happening you can create a festive exit intent pop-up that will give them an additional discount or promotion in order to influence the sale. Make sure to keep these pop-ups fun and in the holiday spirit to further impact those sales.

Also, make sure to take full advantage of well-known holiday discount days, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and after-Christmas sales. Check out our blog on preparing your store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday here.

Incorporate Holiday Bundled Products

Another way to boost your sales during the busy holiday season is by creating fun bundled products. Bundled products are grouped products that are sold together as a single unit for one price- usually at a discounted rate. This helps not only boost your sale, but also encourages customers to buy more products with the intention that they are receiving a better deal! WooCommerce Bundle Products plugin is a favorite of ours that helps you build those bundles easily within WooCommerce. Bundles are specifically helpful for the holiday season because it allows you to create gift baskets sold as bundles for customers that are wanting to gift family and friends for the holidays! This way you can also include products that fit or go together to create a gift bundle that’s perfect for the holiday season that will make consumers happy and boost your sales.

Take Advantage of Integrations

You’ll also want to invest in plugins that will help you integrate your data- Using software integrations is an amazing way to save loads of time and money! Our favorite integration is MyWorks Sync for WooCommerce and QuickBooks. The holiday season is usually the busiest time of year and having to manually input all your orders into QuickBooks to reconcile your sales will take loads of hours! This year, save that precious time and enjoy your holiday by using MyWorks’ integration! MyWorks will automatically sync orders, products, customers, payments, inventory, and more from WooCommerce to QuickBooks (either Online, Desktop, or POS)- you’ll never have to manually input orders in again! What better way to help prepare your WooCommerce store for the holidays?