#3 Rescue Dead-End Experiences

Imagine the excitement of your customers receiving a Deal Busting Promo for your hottest item. They’re ready to buy, but the link brings them to an out-of-stock or broken page. This can dampen the holiday cheer of millions of shoppers and you’ll miss out on revenue.

When customers encounter stock-outs, retailers can lose nearly half of intended purchases. Those abandoned purchases translate into sales losses of about 4% for a typical retailer. For the largest retailers and eCommerce sites, that could mean $400 million a year in lost sales.1

Here’s what you can do to prevent stockouts from causing online walkouts:

• Monitor the customer journey across your site and mobile app for friction caused by out-of-stock items or inventory issues, anytime, anywhere it occurs.

• Collect user experience data to understand its business impact so you can prioritize restocking the highest performing products your customers demand.

• Suggest other relevant products or fully build out the product page’s content to keep shoppers shopping.

• Construct a hybrid page for out-of-stock items that functions as a product listing page combined with a product page.

Rescue Dead-End Experiences #3

App-y Holidays Pro Tip: Ditto for your app experience to prevent costly digital walkouts. Mobile app users are often your most loyal customers, so you must provide superior experiences to keep them satisfied – and keep them shopping. Consumers view 286% more products and add items to their carts at an 85% higher rate when shopping from an app versus mobile browser. 2

BFCM content is frequently added to your site to drive traffic and conversions. But if pages are moved or renamed, or no longer exist, then customers will be driven to a dreaded 404 Error –Page Not Found. BFCM pages can also be contentious and lead to finger pointing (and maybe the occasional middle finger) because marketing teams want hi-fidelity, engineering teams want speed, so you need to strike the optimal balance.

Dead pages can cause customer friction, harm your brand’s reputation, and damage your site’s SEO and Google search rankings. When it comes to successful holiday SEO, the earlier you start, the faster you’ll climb to the top of search results. Here’s what you can do now:

• Make every second count.

• Prioritize repairing the most impactful links.

• Tame your Core Web Vitals.

1 Stock-Outs Cause Walkouts | hbr.org

2 11 Reasons Why You Need a Mobile eCommerce App | BuildFire