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6 Top Tips in getting your digital business ready for Christmas

Christmas Countdown Checklist!

It's that time of the year again and we're expecting Christmas and the Holiday season to be huge online this year so make sure you have all your features, campaigns, assets and timings planned well in advance.

To help you with your planning we've put together this handy topline checklist. Get in touch if you have any other great tips to share with our community and we'll do so in our monthly updates.
WRITTEN BY
SkYWIRE
Posted
July 20, 2020
Jan 12, 2015

The 1st of December is here which mean customers will be going Christmas shopping crazy, particularly online Christmas shopping to avoid the terrifying nightmare of queues.
The festive period accounts for a huge 40-80% of annual sales making it the best time of year to make the Christmas season work for your e-commerce business. The eCommerce and digital marketing pros here at Skywire have put together of our top tips on marketing your business for Christmas and how to give it that little bit of festive sparkle.


1. Subtle Christmas Animation
For our country-loving client, Cordings, we designed a subtle Christmas animation involving the adorable Mr and Mrs Pheasant and a cheeky frosting of snow. Each week in the run up to Christmas the animation would be added to creating a story. These types of additions will help your shoppers get into a festive mind-set and encourage them to shop through your entire gift guide. By promoting this fun festivity on your social media pages and blog, you will naturally attract new customers and engage with existing ones.

2. Christmas up your pages
A cute little robin, a spring of holly, a Christmas hat or even a layer of snow can give your site that added touch of festive cheer. This is an effective way to send out your Christmas message and attract more visitors to your site. Continue this Christmas feel throughout your site by integrating a similar and consistent design on your sliders and campaign images.
Our beauty client NUXE have executed this perfectly with snowy backgrounds on their gift pages.

An easy way to update your homepage for Christmas is by using an simple plugin on the site:
http://workshop.rs/projects/jqsnow/
http://www.schillmania.com/projects/snowstorm/


3. Offer gift-wrapping
The thought having your presents gift-wrapped for you at Christmas…oh how much time will be saved! No matter how simple or elaborate, gift-wrapping is an added customer service that makes an impression about the quality of the gift that’s inside. By designing a section on your homepage or adding a tab in the header of your site, it is vital to share this service with your visitors.
Skywire designed and built a gift-wrapping service for some of our clients , such as the Scottish cashmere brand Johnstons of Elgin and Cordings London.

4. Gift Guide Blogs
There is no shortage of gift guides around during the joyous season and customers expect this. Social media provides a goldmine of opportunity so make sure it is used wisely. Competitions never go a miss around this time of year. Write a compelling blog about your gifting products and post this content on social media. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are a great way to promote your seasonal collections or services and never underestimate the power of a newsletter. Kiss the Moon shared their stocking fillers and special gifts on their ‘Bedtime Blog’.We designed and built a stocking filler competition for NUXE’s Facebook page using an app called Shortstack, for the opportunity to win a hamper of beauty products. This was a great success in increasing the likes, engagement and database for NUXE UK.
NUXE UK FB page: https://a.pgtb.me/nknFP

5. Personalised giftsWhat kind of present can be more appreciated than a personalised one.? All gifts can be given a finishing touch by adding a hand-stitched initial, an engraved date or a printed message to create that special sentiment. With this service, add in a lavish gift box and bags as you wouldn’t an extra special item being presented in an ordinary box now would you?
Johnstons of Elgin offer a unique embroidery service on a selection of their products to create a bespoke gift that is truly unparalleled., while Pink Lining offer ‘cracking Christmas gifts’ by personalising your present – whether a children’s bag or stocking – from only £10.

6. Christmas digital look bookIn this digital age, creating a digital version of your printed look book, especially at Christmas, allows visitors to shop directly from the catalogue as they are on the go. Ensuring this feature includes share buttons, easily downloadable and proudly displaying it on your homepage, all adds to a new inspiring and engaging experience through multiple channels that can set you apart from other brands.
We designed and developed a clickable e-catalogue for Asprey in which directly takes the user to each product featured, making it an extremely user friendly addition for the luxury jewellery brand.We also embedded a Christmas look book for Kiss the Moon, using ISSUU technology.
Overall, adding one or all of these tips, users are likely to spend more time on your Christmassy site as well as more likely to come into your store!


Magento 2 – the emergence of the new Magento M2 platform – has been the question that all of our clients are asking about for 2016. Everyone wants to know what it is and when, or if, to transition to this platform. We answer your questions below.

Magento 1.* EE will be officially supported until end of 2018. It is a mature, stable platform with a large library of off-the-shelf extensions and a large community of helpful information. Magento 2.*, offers developers new tools for testing and writing better code with the following enhancements:

Benefits of Magento 2

  • Improved admin interface
  • Better APIs (integration with 3rd party tools)
  • Streamlined checkout experience
  • Performance and scalability gains
  • Modern frontend and backend framework
  • Comprehensive documentation
  • Internal automated testing framework

The uptake of M2 has been much faster than most expected. Many solutions partners are starting to use Magento 2 for new builds, although there are still very few sites that have been launched on it. Less popular has been the idea of moving M1 sites to M2 – there are still barriers to the process and the benefit vs cost to implement has not yet tipped the balance.

Most merchants are less interested in the initial benefits and more concerned about not being left behind on a legacy platform. While this is a valid concern, Magento has confirmed that they will be supporting M1 until Q4 2018 and that means there is no need to rush the decision on M2. Each merchant should have conversations with their solutions partners to assess the costs and benefits for their individual circumstances.

One of the most positive things we’ve seen since the initial release of M2 has been the pace with which 3rd party extension vendors have ported their extensions. Most, if not all, of the well know and reputable vendors we use now support Magento 2 and have also taken the opportunity to improve the functionality and usability of their extensions via the modern M2 codebase. Magento Marketplace is a good place to see if required extensions are are available for Magento 2. For example, Magestore recently did a brief blog post on the new marketplace and their extensions being featured on it.

Magento have developed a ‘Magento 2 Data Migration Tool’ to help efficiently port all product, customer, and order data, store configurations, promotions etc. to Magento 2. Skywire were one of the first Magento Partners to sign-up for the  “Fundamentals of Magento 2.0 Development” course as part of our education on the Magento 2.0 Platform.

Get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more about M2 for your specific website.

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