With the Christmas countdown fully underway and the scramble for last minute presents looming, what can e-retailers do to snag those last minute sales?

With only days to go, it’s too late to make any massive alterations to your site, just make sure you’ve added a hint of Christmas magic to your landing pages. There are a few basic tweaks you can do to maximise your site’s efficiency, increase sales and improve the customer experience.

Take some time to audit your site, check for out of date plugins or scripts, broken links, poor or slow to load images and any incorrect information. As the buying frenzy escalates, stressed out shoppers won’t wait for your site to load or try and find their way to the page if a link is broken, instead they’ll head straight to your competitors.

This is especially important for any dedicated Christmas pages but worthwhile giving your site a check over to minimise the risk of any issues arising.

Continuing on a customer experience note, make sure your contact details are up to date and clearly visible across your site. You are likely to have more customer queries over this period, so make sure your team is prepped and ready to offer impeccable customer service.

Calls, emails and queries on social media all need to be answered promptly and customer concerns resolved quickly, as each customer query is a potential sale.

Can your customers reach you? If not they won't come back

The festive period is also a good time to go that extra mile for your customers and offer extended returns. You never know whether your niece’s favourite colour has changed from pink to purple overnight and neither do your customers.

Wrong sizes, colours or just not the right gift, you can reassure your customers with the knowledge that the recipients of their presents will have the opportunity to exchange or return items. A longer return period puts the customer first, which is a great retention tactic.

Ensure your returns policies are easy to find and understand and don’t hesitate to highlight your extended returns Christmas offer, it will become a sales driver! You’ll also be matching some of the big retailers such as Monsoon, House of Fraser and Amazon, who all extend their returns policies until the end of January.

We’re not suggesting you copy the competition, but by keeping an eye on your competition you can get some great insight into gaps in the market and exploit them. If you are both selling the same product and they undercut you slightly, find a way to counter with a gift box, personalised card or anything else you can think of that will potentially give you the edge.

You can boost your campaigns and deals around theirs, for example, if they offer a day of free shipping, you can step in and offer a day of free shipping as their deal ends – use your blogs, social media and newsletters to spread the word.

Keep an eye on your margins so you don’t come up short and don’t become so absorbed with beating the competition that you lose focus on your own business and marketing efforts. Sometimes it’s the spur of the moment ideas that have the most success. Don’t forget to tap into trending topics or hash tags to give your own ideas a helping hand.

Shipping can be a tough nut to crack at the best of times and over the festive season it can be a game changer. Firstly, make sure your delivery deadlines are crystal clear and that you can keep to them.

Let them know the final dates for Christmas deliveries

You can also remind your customers of last posting dates: the 19th of December is the last posting date for 2nd class parcels, the 21st of December is the last posting date for 1st class and the 23rd is the last day for Special and Next Day deliveries.

Keep your customers up to date on the status of their orders and they’ll feel more confident about gifts arriving on time. By doing so, you have guaranteed yourself another gold star for retention!

We’ve come to accept, thanks to a few snowy winters over the last few years, that the UK has a tendency to fall apart when the white stuff hits the country! Make sure you’re keeping an eye on the weather – especially if you don’t ship directly from your premises but from a warehouse, for example.

If it looks like delays may be inevitable make sure you inform your customers and update your site accordingly. Burying your head in the snow and hoping that orders arrive on time is not the approach to take!

If you don’t already offer free delivery, it’s worth considering it for this period, even if you choose only to offer it over a certain price threshold or only on certain days, it can still have a great impact on your sales. If you only offer it on certain days, make sure it’s crystal clear which days and publish this info across all your marketing channels to boost activity.

Final word before heading out to the Christmas party, don’t forget to gather as much data as possible during this time as it will help you prepare for next year, increase your mailing lists and improve future marketing campaigns. If it feels like you have Christmas under your belt, then look to the January sales!