Preparing Your Magento 2 Store for Easter: A Merchant’s Guide
The Easter Festive Season is almost here again! Long gone are the days when baked cookies and dyed eggs were bringing alone joy on everyone’s face. Nowadays, it feels like it’s less of the bunny’s “Hop Hop Hop” and more “Buy Buy Buy.” Every festive season turns into a shopping marathon, where the only thing getting a workout is the credit card. That’s why making sure that your online store is ready to meet, greet, and treat the avid shoppers is not just smart, it’s essential. So, we wrote a comprehensive article explaining how you can prepare your Magento online shop for a successful Easter shopping event.
We’re experts in eCommerce development services and we’re here to help you choose the right solution for your business.
Easter spending has always been high. Averaging somewhere at around $21 billion for previous years, the US National Retail Federation estimates that this year will surpass last records, with a figure rising to $24 billion in sales. This year’s spike in Easter shopping spending could be attributed to a few key factors.
First, thanks to the development in AI-driven technologies, retailers can now predict customer preferences with remarkable accuracy, offering personalized recommendations that resonate more deeply with each shopper’s unique tastes and needs.
This heightened level of personalization not only makes the shopping experience more engaging and satisfying for the consumer but also encourages the addition of more items to the shopping cart, thereby boosting overall sales.
Additionally, helped by AI, e-commerce and social media marketing has reached new levels, making it easier than ever for consumers to find and splurge on the perfect Easter gifts, decorations, and gourmet treats, contributing to the anticipated record-breaking spending.
Apart from delivering these positive predictions which for sure put a grin on every online merchant’s face, the research uncovered key data on the factors that drive buying decisions during these holidays.
A significant 63% of people find themselves swayed by traditions, which shows the effect that holiday customs have in influencing shopping habits.
Moreover, 31% of consumers like to show their affection by purchasing holiday-themed products for friends or family.
Another 29% of shoppers are strategic, deliberately waiting for and taking advantage of appealing promotions and discounts to make the most of their holiday expenditures.
The holiday feel plays a key role as well, with 23% making purchases influenced by the attractive store view and festive decorations that capture their attention, turning shopping into a visually stimulating experience.
Additionally, 20% of consumers aim to acquire exclusive and seasonal goods during the holidays, seeking out unique items that are available only during this festive period.
Together, these factors paint a picture of a dynamic marketplace where emotions, tradition, and savvy shopping strategies drive the Easter spending spree. By understanding these insights from the National Retail Federation, online retailers can craft strategic approaches to engage customers effectively.
Tradition-influenced shopping
Not surprisingly, the greatest proportion is made up of shoppers that embrace the Easter tradition. To cater for them, we’re not suggesting a full website redesign, but getting your shop ready for Easter shouldn’t be done hastily either. The first thing to do – adapt your products to align with traditional Easter customs. For example, if your business cannot include Easter specific products, try to offer bundles grouped as Easter baskets and highlight these collections prominently on the homepage and through targeted marketing campaigns. They can be easily created in the Magento admin by adding a bundle product in the Products > Inventory > Catalog section.
At the same time, share tradition-inspired content, possibly incorporating how your products fit into these customs. This could be through blog posts, social media content, or email newsletters. Current evolutions of AI and the launch of ChatGPT have brought immense benefits into eCommerce and there are now some pretty impressive extensions from major plugin providers like Amasty, Webkul, Swissuplabs, that can integrate generative AI into your Magento admin.
Just beware of Google’s new updated algorithms which penalise AI written content. Now, we’re not saying that you cannot use AI, but Google now encourages website owners and content creators to make satisfying content meant for people. Use AI for crafting ideas, or a structure for your content, and have as much input as possible, to transform it into a helping tool where your customers find meaningful information.
Seeing that a good proportion of customers are influenced by store ambiance and decorations, updating the website’s visual design to reflect the festive Easter theme by changing your banners with creatives that promote Easter sales is a good practice and easy to implement.
Another strategy is integrating interactive elements related to Easter on the website, such as an Easter Egg Hunt that offers discounts or special offers when customers find hidden eggs.
The Clever++ team is currently implementing such a functionality on one of the websites that we manage.
Visitors will find eggs in product descriptions or category descriptions (depending on where the web admin has placed the ‘egg’ – an ‘egg_id’ is supplied by the plugin, which is then placed where it is wanted to appear). Based on the rules set, a click on the egg can reveal certain discounts. Once a client discovers an egg, they will not be offered another that day. At the same time, an offered discount code will be automatically set as ‘displayed’ in the database, removing the risk of being shown to other customers.
At first sight, the functionality offers a playful and engaging way for customers to discover discounts by searching for hidden “eggs” throughout the website, but at the same time, it’s a great way to lead new visitors to create accounts, as they can see discount codes only if they are logged in.
Gifts shopping for family or friends
Quite a large proportion of customers still do that. With items here falling more into the ‘meaningful’ and less into the ‘expensive’ category, it is well worth creating a special section on the website where customers can shop for presents to their heart’s content. It’s also a great chance to sell stock that hasn’t proved successful otherwise. Having a fall-back mechanism for unsold stock is a gold mine for merchants, but this will work at its full capacity only if they make the most out of it by employing complex platforms that use AI to analyze shoppers behavior and generate upselling, cross-selling and related product suggestions. Imagine having a complex database of loyal customers who want to please family and friends with small gifts and being able to personalize each message to them based on their previous purchase history!
Our team of developers enabled such a functionality for Cupio, with great results. The team has developed a module which reads the data gathered by Aqurate.ai (which uses AI to analyze shoppers behaviours on the website) and replaces the native Related Products and Upsells widgets from the Magento product pages, showing products generated by the info supplied through the Aqurate API instead. Additionally, the Cross-sell products from the cart are replaced by items supplied by Aqurate’s API.
Strategic Shopping
Let’s face it, there’s nothing customers like more than a good ol’ deal. Price drops, offering free shipping, and providing discounts enhance customer value perception, encouraging more purchases. So, organize timed discounts and flash sales during the lead-up to Easter. Ensure these promotions are well-advertised through all channels, including email, social media, and the website itself.
Adding a countdown timer to the website is a great way to create urgency. Such a function increases the willingness of your visitors to keep shopping and stay in the “Easter spirit”.
For Magento, there are plenty of additional plugins and extensions available that can create this functionality on your website.
What we did successfully was create a teaser page announcing some of the discounts and promotions which will be available, together with a registration form for being notified when the sale becomes active.
We also added a share button, allowing customers to show the page on their favorite social media channels, thus extending the reach and creating a real buzz before the main shopping event.
Once the sale started, this teaser page would be replaced with a highly optimized dedicated landing page featuring all offered products, with a simple and intuitive navigation.
Technical Preparations for Your Magento 2 Store
It’s well known, an optimized website goes a long way and could be the deciding factor between a successful event and a complete disaster. But it also means that the work never stops.
First, merchants need to ensure that they have reliable web hosting, which can up their infrastructure if the need arises. However, sometimes, even the most expensive hosting plans cannot deal with a sudden surge in visitors numbers. One of our long-time proven solutions is the implementation of a custom module which generates a static HTML page with no requirements for any PHP and MySQL processing.
The page contains an index.html, CSS, JavaScript, and images resources and can be generated by running a console command. Products are selected from a specific category (in our case /page-name) whose id is passed as a parameter to the console command which generates the page. Because there are no MySQL or PHP processes running in the background, regardless of the heavy traffic, this page will be up and running seamlessly at all times.
Another solution that we successfully implemented is streamlining Magento’s native Full Page Cache module by using the Varnish cache service for the frontend, Redis cache for the sessions and admin parts, and Rabbit MQ for the correct administration of message queues in Magento.
At the same time, it’s well known that the heavy traffic experienced during these shopping events also brings a surge in cyber attacks. Magento is one of the most solid in terms of eCommerce security, but merchants need to know that in order to benefit from these tight security features, it needs to be updated regularly to the latest versions.
Enhancing User Experience
What merchants need to understand is that when their online stores are overflowing with offers, customers may feel confused during the shopping process. Therefore, navigation should be clear and intuitive and the search function should work seamlessly.
Out of the box, Magento’s search is based on ElasticSearch, which is pretty impressive by itself. However, what we did for our clients is enhance it with a layer of complexity by installing various third-party extensions like Search Ultimate from Mirasvit – a great tool that corrects typing errors, is responsive to both desktop and mobile and returns relevant results within milliseconds.
And… always look after the mighty checkout. Either if you are opting for the native two-step process (Magento promotes these as the most suitable option), or you feel you you could do better with a one-step page, you need to understand that a good checkout gives customers choices, multiple payment options, various shipping possibilities, auto-filling options for delivery – in other words, a clear, intuitive, but highly secure process.
Apart from all these, there’s a new capability which took the world of eCommerce by storm since AI happened – offering highly personalized shopping experiences. By analyzing buyers’ behavior, platforms like Klevu, Nosto or Aqurate.ai can suggest relevant products, personalized to each user. Having this feature somehow creates the impression for your customers that they are being guided throughout the entire shopping experience by an informed store associate. And what’s even better, these platforms can be integrated seamlessly with Magento.
Regardless of the enhancements you select to improve your website’s functionality and appearance, it’s crucial to ensure it’s optimized for mobile, as nowadays shopping experiences are usually cross-platform.
If you want to know more about our list of services at Clever++, please visit our website.