Holidays are the most fantastic eCommerce times of the year, especially in Singapore. However, if you are not prepared to deal with the extra customer traffic in your online store, the holidays might be very stressful. With the high rise of digital marketing business in Singapore, you should plan to have your site running smoothly for you to have increased productive holiday sales. Mistakes may lead to decreased revenue during the holidays due to unhappy customers and shipping slowdowns. You should plan early to avoid some of the common errors regardless of the many customers. This article will go through mistakes you should not make to avoid holiday traffic surges for Singapore E-Commerce stores.
#1. A Hosting Plan That Is Not Efficient Enough to Handle Traffic Spikes
Heavy traffic often causes the site to crash or slow down. The site takes a long time to load causing your customers to move on. Singles Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (and to a lesser extent: Christmas, New Year, Chinese New Year, Deepavali or Hari Raya) often cause crashes to big retailers. However, big company businesses get away with the delay downtime as they often offer an excellent discount. The customers will hang on for a longer time in the site or opt to check- back. This is not the case for small online sellers with no larger bargaining power. If their site experiences delay during a significant sales day, there is a higher probability for the shoppers to take their money elsewhere. To avoid the site crashes and delays during the holidays, consult your web design host to look into your hosting plan. The best action is to upgrade your hosting plan to flexible scalability. This will take care of all the site traffic brought by your sales during the holidays.
#2. No Automated Site Back Ups
Malware threats and hackers are sometimes successful in getting into your website. The threats can cause irreversible problems or crush your site altogether. If you have not fully backed up your website, you can waste a lot of time figuring it out, fixing it and bringing it back online. You will have lost lots of holiday business. Having an automated site backups makes it easy to use the uncorrupted version of your site. Make sure you subscribe to an auto-backup plan of your host plan version.
#3. No Enough Protection Against Hackers and Malware
Many hackers may try to hack your site for data theft or out of boredom. Some of these holiday visitors may be trying to infect your site with malware. Some of websites practices may make it hard for hackers and malware to get into your site. Some of these practices include strong passwords, regular updating of your software and keeping your hardware secure. Despite these measures, you can apply extra measures to boost your site security during high traffic further. Consult your web host on their security measures. You can also find features for regular scanning and removal of malware and updating your server firewalls.
#4. No Extra Fraud-Screening Capacity
Holidays bring with them a lot of orders, and you should be able to approve them as fast especially on some of the Singapore holidays like Christmas and Chinese New Year. The fraudsters take the chance of overwhelming orders to place the wrong orders through. You may receive lots of fraud losses during rapid approvals. Rather than these, you might choose to approve slowly which will not give you huge profits during the season which you should be harvesting. Planning to scale up your sites fraud screening capacity is the best solution. You may update your positive and negative file or hire seasonal customer service reps and analysts.
#5. No Enough Customer Service Options
An excellent online business site should have immediate customer service in the form of social media messaging, live chat or real person phone calls. During the Singapore holidays, customers look for specific sales items and are expecting immediate customer service for inquiry. An email address is not good enough for a quick inquiry. You must be able to answer all the questions in real time to earn more sales. Additional features to enhance your Singapore e-commerce customer service include Facebook customer chat and chat box extension.
#6. No Plan for Handling All Those Extra Orders
Singapore E-Commerce stores makes the most orders in holiday seasons. Packing and shipping of those many orders are tiresome and difficult resulting in delayed shipment delivery and unhappy customers. You can avoid this mistake by ordering extra shipping supplies to avoid depletion of ink, tape, boxes in the high sales season.
In conclusion, rectifying the above mistakes will protect your Singapore e-commerce site from holiday traffic surges.
