The peak online shopping day for Christmas is widely thought to be either the last Monday in November or the first Monday in December. What do you need to do to be ready for "Manic Monday" or "Cyber Monday" and make sure that as much as possible of this online activity ends up in shopping baskets on your site?

The following ideas might help...

Your best prospects are your existing customers and other subscribers

People who have already bought from you, or have otherwise given you their contact details can be assumed to like your products. If yours is the kind of product that is suitable for repeat purchase (and other than those things that are event-driven like moving house, most are) then these people are your best prospects.

Your job is to contact these people, not with boring or desperate "just buy it" messages, but with interesting communications reminding them how good / smart / useful your products are, telling them about new products they may not yet have seen, maybe even inviting them to participate in special offers. You may do this with emails, with social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, or ideally with all of these.

If you need help with choosing an email provider, setting up email subscription on your website, designing an email template or planning out a schedule of email contact, then please do contact us for more information and advice. We can also help with setting up social network pages and with ideas for increasing your following.

Gift Vouchers are especially useful at Christmas

Gift vouchers can be a great product all year round and especially at Christmas. It's quite complicated technically to integrate payment by gift voucher on a transactional website, but if you sell offline as well as online, you can easily sell gift vouchers in your online shop which can be redeemed in store. A great advantage of this approach is that it gets new people into your shop.

If you would like some help to design and produce fabulous looking gift vouchers bespoke to your brand, or with setting up gift vouchers for sale on your site, then do contact us.

I have some great new ideas for my website, should I implement them?

To be quite honest, it is probably too late to be making big technical changes to your site now, in fact most developers ban big changes in November and December because of the risk of something going wrong. Note those ideas down carefully, though, and put them aside safely for the New Year.

However, reviewing all the wording on your site and correcting any errors, checking that all products have images and full descriptions and that no duplicate products exist, are all worth doing. Similarly, time spent merchandising your site to make sure that top selling products get seen by all site visitors, that new products are well dispersed among your upsell / cross-sell slots, etc. is time well spent. Don't forget to remove any items that sell out and replace them promptly too.

How can I make my site look more Christmassy?

As discussed, big technical changes are probably out, but making your site banners look more seasonal is simple and effective. We can help you set up new banners if that helps. While you are at it, do make sure that your banner images aren't showing any products that you no longer sell - you can be sure that potential customers will notice and only want the items they can't have - far better to make a product they can buy look fabulous.

If you need help with lifestyle photography, we have photographers and stylists who can get to work promptly.

Just contact us and we can talk about creating some new banners for you. If you have some photoshop skills, we'll build a layered template for you, which means that you will be able to adapt the banner yourself in future to show different text and images.

How can I get more visitors to the site without it costing me a fortune?

We have done lots of website health checks lately and have been quite surprised at how many online shops are not using simple ways to generate traffic from search engines. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is sometimes considered a bit of a black art, which scares people off and while it is absolutely true that advanced SEO is indeed a very skilled subject, there's no excuse for not getting the basics right.

We would definitely recommend checking your page titles, keywords and descriptions for each content page and looking at how the search terms are generated for your product pages. This should not cost you anything and there's a good chance that it will make a big difference pretty quickly. If you are using Powa, it's exceptionally easy, give us a call and we'll show you how for nothing.

You have made me realise I could use some help. Can we talk directly?

Certainly. Just contact us by phone or email and we'll be happy to have a conversation and if required, we can produce a proposal specific to your business and products.