Your checklist to help boost holiday sales

Late summer is a good time to start preparing for the holiday shopping rush — nearly a quarter of US shoppers surveyed started buying gifts for the 2022 holiday season in October or earlier.¹

Prime time to prep for the holidays

The holiday season is prime time for welcoming online shoppers looking for something unique to buy for friends and family. Your business should consider being ready well before Halloween with a fast, easy, and flexible checkout that helps give early holiday shoppers a satisfying online shopping experience.

There are plenty of ways you can help guide your online shoppers swiftly through payment and checkout. Following even one or two of these simple, actionable steps can help you offer a more convenient shopping experience this holiday season:

• Check the speed of your site
• Prioritize mobile responsiveness
• Offer flexible payment options
• Welcome new shoppers with an accelerated guest checkout process

Check the speed of your site

The speed at which shoppers can move through your site and finalize checkout can play a key role in customer engagement and satisfaction. If your website loads too slowly, busy shoppers might grow frustrated and abandon their purchases.

These tips can help you better ensure a quick, problem-free loading experience:

• Optimize large images and media files for faster loading. The goal is to reduce file sizes and load time without compromising image quality.
• Use browser caching, which stores website files on a local device when customers visit your online storefront. When they return to your site, it will load faster.
• Simplify your site’s design elements, keeping images, scripts, and CSS files to a minimum. Simple designs load faster.

Learn how to optimize website speed.

Prioritize mobile responsiveness

With mobile-first design, you can help holiday shoppers take advantage of the convenience of online shopping from anywhere. Keep in mind that if mobile checkout is too complicated, it could cause shoppers to abandon their carts. Here are some ideas for improving mobile site useability:

• Simplify the buying process with a one-page checkout to reduce the hassle of completing purchases on smaller screens
• Add large buttons and clear labels that are easily visible on mobile screens
• Auto-fill addresses to reduce typing mistakes — or the need to type at all

Learn more about how mobile-first design can help reduce cart abandonment.

Offer varied payment options

A lack of preferred payment options can add friction to the online shopping experience and make shoppers less likely to complete their purchases. As you prepare your website for holiday shoppers, make sure you’re giving customers choice in how they pay.

The founders of Karakoram, a high-performance outdoor-gear company, use PayPal Complete Payments to let customers pay how they want. “People can choose to pay with Venmo, or with anything on their phone, or with their card,” say Bryce and Tyler Kloster. “It’s very user friendly and quick for the customer. People know PayPal, so it’s an easy choice. They trust it.”

Do research to uncover your customers’ preferred payment methods, and go beyond just your business — think about preferred payment methods in your industry, as well as in your region.

• If your research bears it out, offer shoppers alternative payment methods. Digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal smooth the way for customers shopping with their phones.
• Enable installment payment options, especially if you sell higher-ticket items. PayPal Pay Later lets customers purchase and receive what they want while paying over time — and you get paid right away.
• Promote your varied payment offerings in your holiday season marketing channels to raise awareness about the many ways your customers can pay for gifts.

Find these payment types and many more in PayPal Complete Payments, PayPal’s online payments solution that can help you give your customers all the payment options they want in a single solution.

Welcome guests with an accelerated guest checkout

If you’re like most e-commerce business owners, you see more traffic from guest shoppers during the holiday shopping season than at any other time of year. Buying for friends and family can push people to try out new stores where they might not normally shop, so it’s a good time to give your guest checkout a checkup.

To make it easier for visitors using guest checkout, consider adopting an accelerated checkout — a streamlined purchasing process that helps minimize the time and steps it takes to complete a transaction. Accelerated guest checkout solutions like Fastlane by PayPal can help you make the most of holiday guest traffic . In fact, shoppers with Fastlane profiles have been shown to have a guest checkout conversion rate of ~80%.²

Fastlane by PayPal offers businesses a high-speed guest-checkout solution by tapping into the millions of customers who trust the PayPal brand, quickly recognizing shoppers and accessing their saved checkout credentials from a secure network vault. Shoppers can then pay in seconds — all without a password.

Watch the Fastlane webinar to learn more about accelerated guest checkout.

Ring in more holiday sales

This holiday shopping season, welcome shoppers with open arms — virtually speaking — and help your e-commerce business rack up even more holiday sales.

Learn more about how to offer online holiday shoppers their preferred payment methods with PayPal Complete Payments.