Optimizing store design for the holiday season

Holiday selling is all about driving sales, making sure your customers are happy, and keeping them coming back. To do this, you’ll have to prepare your online store with the right treatment beforehand.

Let’s find out how Shopify can enable you to make the most out of holiday selling season this year.

In this video, you’ll learn how to:

Optimize your homepage to drive sales with the theme editor
Make it easy for your shoppers to buy the products they’re looking for with product sections
Announce key information to give your buyers the info they need

[MUSIC PLAYING] For any high volume selling season, it's important to have your online store ready for the influx of shoppers. In this video, we'll give you five ways to set up and optimize your online store for success during any holiday selling season. Let's get started. Give your online store a makeover. Shoppers today expect to get the best deals and products for their money.

So most importantly, you'll want to showcase your deals in full view. The best way to do this is by displaying holiday selling offers on your homepage. It's the best place to shoutout your awesome deals and exciting photos, videos, and bold banners. With the theme editor, you can easily make content sections where you can add photos of your offer and even link your customers right to the deals for easy shopping.

And don't forget about mobile too. During last year's holiday selling season, Shopify stores saw more mobile purchases than desktop purchases. And the great news is that all of Shopify themes are responsive and mobile-friendly so you can see exactly how it looks on a phone. A great online store has one goal, to make it easy for people to buy. Too little or too much content can make or break a visitor's experience.

You'll want to make the shopping experience as frictionless as possible. Meaning, it's easy for your shoppers to find products without any distractions. Another way to simplify the buying experience? Take advantage of the holiday shopping rush by displaying your featured best-selling products, collections, and deals right on your homepage so your customers can quickly find what they're looking for or what they didn't know they needed.

Although holiday purchases can sometimes be impulsive, buyers still need to trust who they're shopping with. Adding sections like customer testimonials, relevant blog, or curated video content to your online store goes a long way in reassuring potential customers that you're a reputable brand. Adding a well-written About Us page to your navigation also helps build trust with your visitors.

You can even add social sharing links to your social network profiles that lets your shoppers connect and engage with you. Shoutout announcements. If you've got important announcements like free shipping deals, discount codes, or holiday return policies, you'll want to optimize your header and footer sections to show this information. Adding an announcement to the header section of your pages is a great way to shoutout discount codes for your buyers to use at checkout or display free shipping deals.

Talk about your return policies. One downside of online shopping is that sometimes you'll order the wrong size or the color wasn't what you expected. That's why it's important to have a flexible return policy. This not only gives shoppers peace of mind, but I've seen many innovative businesses use their return policy as a powerful marketing tool. You'll want to include important links to your return policies and hard to miss places like your website footer, product pages, or at checkout so your customers can't miss it in the navigation menu.

Seasonal selling is all about driving sales, making sure your customers are happy, and keeping them coming back. To do this, you'll have to prepare your online store with the right treatment beforehand. We hope these tips help you to make the most out of the holiday selling season. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Preparing for holiday selling season made easy.

Learn more about customizing your theme with the theme editor from the Shopify Help Center
Read more about picking a beautiful, mobile-friendly theme from the Shopify Theme Store