From clicks to conversions — maximizing your digital storefront’s impact in peak seasons
As consumers continue to return to in-store shopping, they’re not fully reverting to their pre-pandemic habits. Instead, they now have new expectations, looking for a seamless blend between online and in-person shopping experiences.
If your business operates solely online, don’t worry. These evolving preferences highlight the lasting influence of ecommerce and the persistence of certain shopping behaviors formed during the pandemic. Above all, customers will continue to demand smooth, hassle-free online experiences — and those retailers who can’t deliver them risk missing out on valuable sales.
To help you maximize success during peak season, we’ve outlined key front-end strategies like personalized product recommendations, relevant search results, an engaging homepage, and flexible payment options like buy now, pay later.
Merchandising
Facilitate browsing with category landing pages
Merchants can improve the shopping experience with minimal technical investment by building the right pathways for customers to browse digitally. Prospects often navigate to your site with an idea of a service, a product, or an experience they want to find. To support these expectations and create opportunities for new discoveries, use category landing pages to group your merchandise so customers can browse for related options they might not have considered.
Category landing pages are typically grouped around the product but could be grouped around concepts or topics as well. For example, a category focused on “camping” that includes outerwear, sleeping bags, small-batch ground coffee, and other loosely related items can help a shopper capture a more complete view of their options. If you want to build these pages quickly, Page Builder in Adobe Commerce is an easy and efficient tool to use.
Tailor the browsing experience
Merchandisers often spend significant time manually optimizing category pages by boosting, burying, pinning, and hiding products to showcase top sellers, but this approach has several limitations. Manual merchandising is time-consuming and doesn’t scale well for merchants managing extensive catalogs. Additionally, you lose the option to personalize since category pages remain static. We recommend you use Intelligent Category Merchandising, an AI tool that automatically re-ranks products to boost relevance and conversions, adapting in real time based on user behavior and helping tailor the user experience.
Be relatable
Product recommendations help customers make new discoveries and locate products that fit their needs, all while driving sales. The AI-powered product recommendation engine is a core part of the Adobe Commerce platform. It uses Adobe Sensei, a proven machine learning algorithm, to analyze shopper behavior and make relevant recommendations within seconds. Additionally, the engine continually learns as it collects shopping data so that recommendations become refined over time.
You can also use Page Builder to easily add a variety of product recommendations — such as “also viewed,” “also bought,” “bestselling,” and so on — to virtually any page in your web store. If you don’t currently include product recommendations as part of your shopping experience, we suggest adding and testing them before peak season.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to use Commerce’s native product recommendations tool, you can connect your Commerce instance to a homegrown model or one of the many third-party solutions available in Adobe’s Commerce Marketplace.
Site content
Make home a welcoming place
Your homepage is the digital front door to your ecommerce site, a crucial place to create a welcoming, engaging first impression during peak season. Highlight your most popular categories, feature key products, and promote your latest offers prominently. Quick links to common FAQs and a concise, visible statement about shipping and return policies are essential to build trust. If you offer curbside or in-store pickup, be sure to clearly mention it. Additionally, calling attention to buy now, pay later options can help customers feel more confident in making larger purchases.
Beyond showcasing key information, your homepage should remove friction and guide visitors to the next step in their shopping journey. Incorporate clear and compelling calls to action like “Shop Now” or “Find a Store,” making sure they are easily clickable and help drive conversions during the busy season.
Be where your customers want to land
Spend time researching and analyzing the most common landing pages that your customers visit based on search engines and referrers. If your home page is high on this list, be sure to identify the top 10 pages that customers visit when they come across your site for the first time. Just like the home page, optimize content on these 10 pages by sharing accessible information on shipping, returns, and sales. Take a moment to verify that the content on these pages — like descriptions, color options, customization, and images — is within your current brand guidelines.
When conducting this page analysis, gather insights from both current and historic trends. We highly recommend evaluating how your site performed during the same period in previous years so you can identify which pages drive the highest conversion rates.
Don’t slip when it’s time to ship
When it comes time to complete their purchase, customers don’t want to be surprised about the price, timing, or options for shipping. Clearly communicate shipping expectations throughout the customer journey and prominently display shipping information on product detail pages. At a minimum, customers should see information on shopping options, prices, and delivery timing.
We also highly recommend offering alternative shipping options, such as buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) or curbside pickup. Providing shoppers with the choice of how they receive their goods empowers them with the speed and timing most compatible with their lives.
Also, it won’t hurt sales to have a free shipping option. This kind of promotion has proven successful for ecommerce businesses in virtually every industry. You can even offer multishipping, which enables customers to ship an order to multiple addresses during a single checkout.
Engagement
Make sure you’re searchable
Adobe Commerce offers Live Search, a native search capability that delivers lightning-fast, hyper-relevant results by using Adobe Sensei to analyze aggregated visitor data. This data, when combined with your site’s catalog, results in highly engaging, relevant, and personalized shopping experiences. If you aren’t using Live Search yet, we suggest adding and testing the feature before peak season.
Don’t let sign-up be a letdown
Requiring customers to sign up for an account before purchase can cause many shoppers to abandon their orders. If you don’t already offer a guest checkout option, we strongly suggest setting one up before peak season. Guest checkout is proven to increase conversions.
Once the guest option is in place, persuading (but not forcing) customers to sign up for an account or opt in to a newsletter during checkout can be a great choice. Rather than just asking directly, include context about the benefits of signing up.
For account signups, explain how an account can enhance future shopping via order recall, faster returns, loyalty program eligibility, and easier checkout. If you don’t already have a loyalty program in place, you can build one quickly with. Also, let customers know whether the newsletter includes discounts or coupons. In either case, be sure that your sign-up process uses the reCAPTCHA tool for security.
Another way to streamline signing up for an account is to let them use their social media credentials. You can find a wide variety of social integration extensions on the Adobe Commerce Marketplace.
Chat with your customers
Providing a live chat feature offers an effective alternative for personalized, quick communication with customers. When selecting the right tool for your digital storefront, consider whether you need preformatted answers, how you’d like to configure your administrative interface, and how live chat might integrate with other extensions on your site.
Multiple live chat extensions are available in the Adobe Commerce Marketplace.
Payment options
Think outside the credit card
Even though credit cards are crucial for online shopping, offering multiple payment methods can speed up customer checkout and reduce cart abandonment. It has never been easier to accommodate the many ways that customers pay online, so we recommend exploring integration options for PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Wallet. Head to the Marketplace to see all payment options that are offered for Adobe Commerce.
When looking at your payment options, consider Payment Services for Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source. Payment Services is a fully integrated payment solution that lets you securely manage payment and order data from all your storefronts in one place — your Commerce dashboard.
Fraud protection
Adobe’s partnership with Signifyd solves the challenges that growing ecommerce businesses persistently face: billions of dollars lost in chargebacks, customer dissatisfaction from mistaken declines, and operational costs due to tedious, manual transaction investigation.
Signifyd’s guaranteed fraud protection is supported by a full-service cloud platform that automates fraud prevention through real-time machine learning, allowing businesses to increase sales and open new markets while reducing risk. When a customer places an order with your Adobe Commerce store, Signifyd automatically reviews the order and tells you whether to ship it or not. They back their decisions with a 100% financial guarantee against fraudulent chargebacks so you can focus on growing your business with zero fraud liability.
Don’t be afraid of deferral
In difficult economic times, deferred and structured payment systems can help convert customers who might need some assistance. PayPal Credit and PayLater offer deferred payment options to customers during the checkout process. Adding flexible payment methods will attract customers and improve the overall shopping experience.
One step to success
To reduce abandoned carts, we recommend using tools that help customers accelerate the sales process. Adding one-page checkout — which is native to Adobe Commerce — can drive conversion by reducing the number of clicks during checkout. Instant purchase can also expedite checkout for registered customers by using information saved in their accounts. You can find many more extensions to optimize the checkout experience in the Adobe Commerce Marketplace.
Need more guidance?
If you’d like more content on preparing your site for peak season, we also recommend the following resources for further reading:
- Adobe Commerce 2.4 upgrade process
- Adobe Commerce 2.4 Upgrade Workshop
- Adobe Commerce video tutorials on Experience League
- Adobe Commerce general best practices
Corey Gelato is a senior commerce strategy consultant at Adobe.
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