Temperatures are climbing and your customers are eager to spend their free time in the sun on holiday or at home in the garden. Online shopping? Not really at the top of their priorities during the summertime. Nevertheless, these months are enormously valuable for your online store. With the following five tips you can ensure stable sales throughout the warmer summer months.
1. Effective even in summer: create attractive offers
Both slow sellers and new products are perfect for attractive offers – maybe even in combination? Create bundle offers by promoting the sale of your slow sellers and thus creating space for new products.
So how do you do that? With dynamic product groups, you can compile a selection of products based on definable criteria. These product groups can be assigned to a sale category, for example.
You can easily add all the slow sellers that you want to offer to your customers at a discount to a sale category via the dynamic product group and your customers can access your attractive offers via a sale button or a sale product slider.
Caseys Furniture, for example, offers its customers attractive special offers via the Winter Sale category, which are additionally highlighted by a sale product slider on the homepage of the online store. Customers are thus immediately attracted by the tempting discount promotion when they enter the online store.
2. Inspire your customers with storytelling
Are you sure that your customers can easily imagine what your products are like live in action? Offer them a bit of inspiration and help them visualise how the product benefits their everyday life! Create descriptive look books or tell a story about your products and their creation. This is a powerful way to deliver memorable sales and marketing content – and remember by nature, original content leads to more organic traffic.
You can do this by designing your Shopping Experiences simply and intuitively and presenting your products to your customers in a user-friendly way. With the CMS extensions, which are included within the Shopware 6 Professional Edition, you can take your customers on a journey through your store and offer them more information about your company, products and more.
The eco & fair fashion label ARMEDANGELS, for example, presents and informs in the Mission section what is possible in terms of sustainable fashion and clarifies the production sins of the fashion industry.
The fashion label also presents its customers in the Starterpack category via a bestseller configurator appealing combinations of denim jeans and t-shirts. Customers can get inspired here and create the perfect everyday outfit quickly and easily. Furthermore, an additional 15% discount on combinations of denim jeans and T-shirts encourages customers to buy quickly.
3. Create added value
Customers love it when you provide them with added value – whether it's through general knowledge, recipes or practical tips. This makes it as easy as possible for your customers to come to an informed decision about your products. Additionally, added value not only ensures that you stand out from the competition, but also offers a good opportunity to cross-link to thematically suitable products in your shop.
The specialist for model landscaping called NOCH not only inspires its customers with numerous products within the areas of creative handicrafts, diorama construction, model railroad construction or wargaming, but also offers model construction enthusiasts useful instructions for designing their own model landscapes in the handicraft tips section. The Shopware 6 Shopping Experiences were also used here to immerse customers in the unique miniature worlds.
4. Be prepared for peak phases
‘The calm before the storm’ says is all – with popular retail seasons quickly approaching, now is the opportune time to prepare your shop for events such as Black Friday or the holidays.
To get the most out of such a peak season, you can also plan tempting discount promotions for your customers right now. For example, create temporary discount codes that make it worthwhile to strike quickly. Using the Rule Builder included in Shopware 6, you can define individual rules based on conditions. This allows you not only to define discount promotions with promotional codes, but also to offer general discount promotions, such as "10% off everything".
For more tips on how to prepare for Black Friday, Singles Day and Cyber Monday, read our Peak Season article.
5. Set yourself apart from others!
Last but not least, you should always be open for new ideas! Be courageous, leave the established paths and set yourself apart from your competitors. This makes you all the more successful and helps your customers build a memorable connection with your brand.
The original online store of the sustainable fashion brand Vintageria is the perfect example of this. Not only does Vintageria's fashion inspire the target group with the flair of the '80s and '90s, but the design of the online store also picks up on the iconic decades. The playful look of the online store was implemented using Shopware PWA and the headless infrastructure. This allowed those involved to work creatively on the project without restriction and to maintain the usual user-friendliness at the same time.
