Designing your eCommerce Website this Christmas Season
By: Sadia Mehmood
Tags: Ecommerce Web Development, Development, Christmas, Website, Ecommerce

Long-awaited time of the year — Christmas cheer is around the corner!

Time to hang a wreath at your front door, and take out those Christmas decorations from the attic.

Speaking of tinsel and trinkets, whenever you walk into a store during the holiday season, your face lights up with Christmas joy, stunning tree decorations… sales, discounts, and special holiday offers. All welcoming the Christmas spirit with open arms.

Houses and malls are not the only places that need fairy light decorating, your eCommerce store also needs some garlands and nutcrackers.

On one hand, this Pandemic has affected our physical Christmas shopping experience. On the other, online stores are preparing to give the best experience with stunning Christmas-themed landing pages and festive designs.

There is no doubt that the holiday season is actually an online shopping season.There are 2.05 billion online shoppers in 2020, and eCommerce sales are predicted to hit $6.5 trillion by 2023. Exciting!

Crazy Christmas Shoppers — Giphy

Every year families visit their favorite stores to buy Christmas presents, this year might be a little different. How? It’s time online stores have become an ideal destination for gift shopping.

Therefore — to all eCommerce stores- put in some effort and glitter your digital stores to welcome those crazy shoppers! Because over 60% of US consumers prefer to buy their holiday gifts online.

In this blog, I will share some genuinely amazing ideas about how you can transform your eCommerce web design this Christmas to enhance the customer experience.

So, ho ho ho, let’s take a peek.

Tweak your web design to give it a nice Christmas-y touch.

During the holiday season, don’t be scared to modify your eCommerce web design according to the Christmas theme. Make it look more attractive for potential customers to visit and make a purchase.

The world becomes brighter around Christmas and so should your online platform and when it comes to choosing gifts, your eCommerce web solution should standout.

Change font styles and colors, add elements such as jingle bells, Santa hats, gifts, snowflakes, etc. to match the festive atmosphere. Offer special holiday collections and detailed product catalogs to boost the shopping experience. Few things you can do with your website:

Newsletter subscription popup, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy new year

You can add animations of Santa Claus on a sleigh with Dascher

Change color palette according to the theme — the redder the better

Rearrange your product catalog — popular items around Christmas should be on the top

To make things easier, you can find free christmas website templates on shopify, themeforest etc.

Recommended: How to build eCommerce websites in 10 simple steps?

Add festivity to your product images.

Product images are the most important part of your eCommerce development. Here Target or Macys’ have more advantage over your online store since people can touch and feel items. They can observe every little detail. Whereas, adding an emotional feel to the products can be very challenging for online sellers.

Source — Freepik

Your products should be able to recreate that feeling people feel in physical stores. However, choosing just the right type of visuals can fill the gap and create in-person shopping experiences online. To connect with customers, upload Christmas themed product images.

Add a little weight to your promotional campaign with infographics, 360-degree visuals, and videos, GIFs, holiday content, design, and special effects. Include some Christmas elements to your photography but try not to overdo it, because the last thing you want is to look cheesy.

But ensure that your visuals are responsive and don’t take forever to load.

CTA buttons are important, make them shine.

If you do not want to do too much with your website, only adding a little tinsel here and there can do the trick. Make your CTA buttons stand out. Decorate them using minimalist design elements while maintaining your overall business look.

Making only subtle changes can add to holiday cheer. Use cute gift icons or bells or snowflakes to give your CTAs a celebratory look or better yet animations can always help. Additionally, jazz up the content on your CTA button; replacing the simple ‘Add to wishlist’ with ‘Add to Santa’s nice list’ can sound much merrier.

Some brands strictly follow their design guidelines — changing aesthetics can be blasphemous for them. But still having little fun with the buttons can help pay just the right amount of homage to Christmas.

Highlighting special offers and discounts on the top of the page.

Source — Giphy

This is that time of the year again where you are supposed to be bragging about your special discounts and 2 for 1 offers. Use illustrations to add excitement to your discount offers. Feature them where they are prominently displayed. Use homepage sliders, because they are back in business, baby. They let customers focus on key messages.

This way you can display more than one discount offer using stunning imagery. Using sliders can save the hassle of searching for offers, also header sliders are a great way to highlight discounts accompanied by a CTA (That’s a plus).

Revamp the Logo to fit the theme.

Many companies are trying to align themselves with the merriment of Christmas by modifying their branding activities accordingly. So jump on the bandwagon and design an amazing holiday version of your logo.

You don’t have to do much to add joy-ness to the brand.

Design your 301 And 404 error pages.

This may seem less important but trust me, it is not. Excessive load on the website can slow it down, and also you never know of any uninvited irregularities. So it’s better to plan ahead!

If your website during the peak season is not functioning properly, it is bound to frustrate online shoppers. Make it interesting to secure your chance of having returning customers.

Source — Google Images

Customize the design of your error pages. Give ‘404’ a little Santa’s hat, draw a special custom illustration, or add a ‘dancing elf’ animation to it followed by an error message, such as: ‘Ho, ho, ho… Santa’s sleigh stuck in the snow, you finish that egg-nog, while Santa’s little helpers, help him unstuck’.

No one likes errors, not even me. But seeing this message will surely entice your customers. Humor always helps! That’s given.

Some additional tips for eCommerce Christmas cheer.

Responsive design

Your website design should be responsive. Are you sure it is? Check it one more time. According to Statista, 177.4 million buyers in the US will buy products online using their smartphones. It’ll be a bummer if your website did not respond as it should.

Use chatbots.

Use Christmas AI-driven chatbots to personalize the entire experience. Chatbots are available round the clock, with little chance of missing on any customer interaction, which as a result increases conversion and retention rates.

Recommended: Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce — How can you integrate it?

Test your website.

Run quality assurance tests of your website regularly. According to Kissmetrics stats, 47% of online customers expect web pages to load within 2 seconds. With all the shopping haul, you don’t want your customer stuck on loading, now do you?

Mobile commerce is trending.

According to big commerce, mobile eCommerce sales are expected to account for 54% of total eCommerce sales by 2020. Optimize your website accordingly. You know what to do.

Play around with Virtual Reality.

77.24% of shoppers abandon their carts before completing a purchase. Therefore introducing VR to your eCommerce is a step in the right direction.

Up your SEO game.

Use Google’s keyword planner to extract the right keywords for your content. Boost your content marketing strategy.

The merrier the Christmas, the better.

The holidays bring quite festive web designs for eCommerce stores. You can do plenty. All online stores are looking to generate as many sales as possible. Christmas follows a gift-giving tradition, which is ideal for online sellers. Therefore, your eCommerce web design has to be unique.

If you want to make your eCommerce store bag more cash next holiday season, feel free to contact Invozone — one of Canada’s leading IT companies.

Stay safe and stay home for the holidays.

Key Takeaways

Use Christmas themed color palette

Highlight discounts and special offers using illustrations

Use customised images to get in touch with customer’s emotions

Mention links to your social platforms and blog content

Modify your website design, make it more festive

Use subtle design elements and icons to add a little joy

Bonus: Offer free shipping and gift packaging

Wishing you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year!