Between time with their families, festive errands, and the hypnotizing distraction of perpetual holiday music, trying to capture the attention of holiday shoppers can be daunting for independent retailers. With 42% of consumers planning on shopping with Amazon, you may be wondering how you can stand out against the competition.

Our partners at Episerver just released their Online Shopping Trends of 2019 Report, and we took an in depth look to find easy-to-implement solutions that will help you stay ahead of the herd.

Trend #1: Searching for Deals

As the days tick down to Christmas, customers switch into goal-oriented shopping mode. It becomes a subconscious game, and completing the mission is the main objective. Shoppers adamantly search for the best deals online, scouring the web in hopes of finding something special.

This week, we welcome a guest post from our Senior Digital Strategist, Brittany Moreland.

Brittany helps our e-commerce clients utilize data to deliver omni channel marketing automation experiences. She specializes in combining data analytics, customer journey mapping, and research-based insights to develop scalable and profitable digital marketing solutions.

Personalization is vital to the success of any marketing strategy. As e-commerce becomes more and more competitive, it’s essential that brands engage existing and potential customers with hyper-relevant personalized experiences.

One way to provide a memorable personalized customer journey is through user-specific product recommendations. According to Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who provide relevant offers and recommendations.

Today, we’re digging in on how Episerver Perform helps enhance product discovery and increase cart value with smart product recommendations. Learn how Episerver Perform helps you achieve a 24/7 personalized buying experience across all channels.

One of the biggest frustrations web users face is waiting for a page to load (ain’t nobody got time for that!). With so many alternative sites available at their fingertips, online shoppers don’t have the patience to suffer slow websites. Today’s digital world moves fast, and your website should too.

If your pages don’t load like lightning, users move on and you lose the opportunity to convert clicks into sales. In fact, according to top web influencer Neil Patel, 47% of consumers expect pages to load in two seconds or less. Every second counts – 40% of visitors will abandon a page that takes over three seconds to display.

Don’t leave your visitors waiting! Follow our four steps for identifying performance issues and optimizing your website.

The process of thoughtfully improving a website or digital product’s ease-of-use and user flow through customer-focused design, is half science, half art, but it’s key to retaining and converting visitors, and maximizing your website investment.

Aesthetically-pleasing design and flashy trends won’t safeguard your site from usability issues or guarantee a valuable customer journey. In fact, they frequently get in the way. Great user experience (UX), requires planning, testing, and investing in strategic design resources up front, but a well-designed and well-defined user interface reduces rework and wasted development time, decreases customer support calls, and, most importantly, increases customer retention rates and sales.

In fact, according to Forbes, every dollar devoted to user experience returns $10 to $100. Forrester agrees, finding that visit-to-lead conversions can be 400% higher on sites with a “superior user experience.”

Don’t turn off your prospects and customers with a sub-par, friction-filled website. Follow our 4 simple UX principles and best practices to improve your site’s ease-of-use, solve customer pain points, deliver memorable brand experiences, and increase conversions.

Your website is an essential channel to reach customers and prospects 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Your site drives sales, captures new leads, and provides customers valuable information about your products and services.

Too often, though, brands prioritize impactful design or trends over website user experience. The result is an expensive and aesthetically pleasing, but confusing and friction-filled website that bleeds users and skyrockets bounce rates.

We all want our digital brand representation to have a WOW factor – to capture audience attention and help us stand out from the competition.

Today, we’ll explain what User Experience (UX) is and why it’s good business.