Increase Your Ecommerce Sales During Holiday Shopping Season With these Tools

Introduction

Ah, the holiday shopping season - the time when everyone suddenly remembers they need to buy gifts for their loved ones (and maybe a few things for themselves). For e-commerce businesses, it’s like the Super Bowl of sales, with shoppers ready to click "Add to Cart" faster than Santa's sleigh on a caffeine high.

In fact, total retail sales during the 2023 holiday season reached an all-time high of 929.5 billion the U.S. alone, and is forecasted to go even higher in the 2024 holiday shopping season.

With so much competition in the ecommerce space, standing out in the crowd is no easy feat. That’s why using the right tools isn’t just a smart move - it’s essential. The right toolkit can help your products shine like the top of a Christmas tree, engage customers meaningfully like they’re having a cozy chat by the fireplace.

In this article, we’ll break down the key tools that can help you boost your e-commerce sales this holiday season into three main categories:

1. Product Discoverability: Tools that make sure your products are seen easily by shoppers who are looking for them.
2. Customer Engagement: Solutions that keep customers interested and invested, from their first visit to checkout (and beyond).
3. Business Intelligence: Data-driven insights that help you make smarter, faster decisions so you can navigate the holiday rush like a pro.

Settle in, and let’s unwrap some of the best tools to help your e-commerce business sleigh (pun intended) this holiday season.

Product Discoverability Tools For Ecommerce

During the holiday season, product discoverability is all about making sure your products get noticed. With thousands of e-commerce stores competing for attention, your listings need to stand out like the last gift under the tree.

This is where Product Discovery Optimization comes in. It’s not just about catchy titles and good-looking photos; it's also about ensuring that your product is easy to find on Google with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), easy to find by shoppers looking for them on your website, and descriptive enough to convince shoppers to make the purchase.

Some Product Discoverability Tools to enhance your ecommerce store include:

Google Search Console

Google accounts for about 90% of all searches done online today. It's important to ensure that your website is optimized to rank high on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for relevant searches by shoppers.

With Google Search Console, you can easily measure your site's Search traffic and performance, fix issues and make your website, and your products, highly visible in Google Search results.

Apparel Auto-Tagger

Ensuring product visibility online requires accurate, relevant, and comprehensive product tagging. However, manual tagging is time-consuming and prone to errors. As catalogs grow, maintaining accurate tags becomes challenging, leading to potential misrepresentations and weakened SEO.

No wonder only 18% of companies achieved a visibility score of 80% or higher, highlighting the competitive challenges in ensuring product visibility online.

The Apparel Auto-Tagger, with the aid of powerful Visual AI Technology, automatically generates content such as product descriptions, tags, colours, and types - based on the images of the products in your catalog.

Just add images to your products, generate the content, and start selling immediately! Your products become more discoverable through improved keywords, making it much easier for shoppers to find items on your store.

This solution is also available for non-Shopify stores through the Apparel Auto Tagging solution on the Lykdat Console.

Fashion Image Search API

Embedding an Image Search solution allows shoppers to easily find items on your ecommerce website or online store, even when they don't have the perfect words to describe what they want during search.

The Lykdat Image Search solution is also available as a plugin on the Bigcommerce app store.

Customer Engagement Tools For Ecommerce

About 69.99% of all shoppers abandon items in their carts, an average from 48 different cart abandonment studies.

The concept behind customer engagement for ecommerce is to ensure you have the right tools to keep shoppers meaningfully engaged, even when they are unable to make an immediate purchase. This way, the shoppers are empowered (I know "empowered" here is dramatic lol) to complete their purchases on your website once the stars align.

Some must-have Customer Engagement Tools for Ecommerce include:

The Watchlyst -Price Alerts

This easy-to-install Shopify app monitors product prices, and send emails to subscribers when the price drops or hits the target set by them.

Back in Stock: Restock Alerts

This Shopify plugin helps you retain sales on out-of-stock products with back-in-stock email & SMS notifications to ensure your customers can order directly from your store when products become available again.

Product Alerts Solution

A combination of both Price Alerts and Back In Stock Alerts, the Product Alerts Solution by Lykdat allows retailers send personalized automated email notifications when their favourite items on your website are back in stock or available at a reduced price.

The Product Alerts API powers Price Whistle, a popular tool helping shoppers track discounts and price drops on their favourite products. Read the Price Whistle Case Study here.

Product Alerts is also available for Shopify and BigCommerce stores.

Retail Intelligence Tools For Ecommerce

With retail intelligence solutions, brands and retailers are empowered with the retail insights they need to create market-aligned consumer-ready products and stay ahead of the competition. With the trends and insights from these solutions, you can make real-time merchandising and pricing decisions more profitably during the holiday shopping season.

Top retail intelligence tools for your Ecommerce business include:

Stylumia - Consumer Intelligence For Fashion & Lifestyle

Stylumia is a data-driven fashion insights platform that helps brands optimize their inventory, design, and merchandising decisions. It uses AI to analyze consumer demand and predict trends by monitoring e-commerce, social media, and other digital data.

Stylumia’s goal is to reduce overproduction and stock issues by aligning product offerings with real-time consumer preferences, making it especially useful for sustainable fashion practices.

Woven Insights - Fashion Market & Consumer Intelligence Tool

Woven Insights combines both consumer insights and market insights in one AI-powered data analytics solution, designed for fashion businesses.

It provides comprehensive consumer insights with competitive analysis, product performance tracking, and sentiment analysis; and helps fashion businesses understand market trends such as colour trends, product assortment, pricing, and inventory & demand. It caters to companies of all sizes by offering accessible and affordable analytics tools for strategic decision-making in fashion retail.

EDITED - Retail Market Intelligence For Fashion

EDITED is a retail analytics platform that provides real-time data on pricing, product assortment, and market trends for fashion brands. By tracking global e-commerce sites, it offers insights into competitor pricing, discount strategies, and product performance, helping brands make data-driven decisions on inventory and merchandising.

Conclusion

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, 3 major areas to leverage for improved sales and revenue for your ecommerce business are Product Discoverability, Customer Engagement, and Business Intelligence.

With the tools highlighted in this article, you have all you need to increase digital visibility for your brand and products, engage meaningfully with shoppers, and stay ahead of competitors - during the holiday shopping season and beyond.