Take the time to ask yourself and the team questions.

What search queries did shoppers look for in the last holiday season? What is the current trend of search queries (general and holiday-specific)? Are you running low on the products your shoppers want? Do you need to replenish your stock? Is poor relevancy preventing your shoppers from seeing certain products? 

There are a bunch of questions you need to check off your list! But first, extract the list of popular search queries and use search analytics to understand the results served to your shoppers. 

Use a large corpus of synonyms, phrases, etc., to develop catalog understanding using the Unbxd Site Search Console. This (read: every) holiday season will be super busy, so make sure your shoppers can find the products they love.

Set up synonyms and error detectors correctly, optimize word breaks, and include autosuggestions. A thorough audit of relevance by analyzing popular search queries will help improve your shoppers' overall buying experience. 

Once you identify the most popular search query, you can curate a dedicated landing page this year - for example, "Black Friday Specials." Next, analyze your search query data and action the most common trends for 2022. 

Did customers have "no results found" during the 2021 holiday season? Take action right away to prevent it from happening again. Add appropriate synonyms and redirects to any queries that provided "zero results" in the previous year.

Implement autocorrect and "did you mean" recommendations if spelling mistakes are a problem. There are other ways to optimize "no result found" pages, like:

1. Promoting bestsellers or popular categories. 
2. Recommending queries like "people who searched 'ABC' also viewed 'XYZ'" 
3. Curating redirects for such queries 

Which category pages had the highest traffic during the holiday season

in 2021? 

Investigate your best and worst-performing categories' page views, time

on the page, bounce rates, exit rates, interactions, and page values. Evaluate

and see if any quick wins will help your underperforming

areas from last year, and double down on the landing pages, language,

and promotions that resonate. 

Find new ways to optimize and tweak your merchandising strategy to create an engaging product presentation. Increase the visibility of top-selling, best-rated, or discounted items to pique customers' curiosity.

A/B testing demonstrates the efficacy of potential changes, enabling data-driven decisions and ensuring positive impacts. Merchandizers can plan prior A/B tests before the holiday season to evaluate multiple strategies and implement the one performing better. During A/B Test experimentation, merchandizers can decide on the following: 

a) Traffic Split 

b) Control the test duration 

c) Decide the winning criteria (Conversion/Average Order Value/Revenue)

How does your average order value (AOV) of last year's holiday season compare to the rest of the year? If it's much lower, it may indicate that you need to upsell and cross-sell more over the upcoming season. Product recommendations can be used to provide buyers with customized recommendations. They may visit your website with a certain product in mind, only to be genuinely delighted to discover that you also carry other things on their holiday shopping list. During sale seasons, impulse purchases are at an all-time high, thus improving product exposure to raise cart values.

Consider last year's reports for guidance and inspiration as you prepare for the upcoming holidays in 2022. If retailers want to surpass the success of previous years, they must base their merchandising efforts on data. 

Unbxd provides simple-to-understand ecommerce reports and analytics for a deeper comprehension of your customer's activity.

Book a demo here if you want to know more about what Unbxd smart Merchandising can do for you when you're at your peak. You'll see what our box of surprises has in store for you! 

At Unbxd’s first Blogathon event, we asked our “in-house” experts to write articles for us - anything straight out of their minds! And boy - did we love reading it all! 

Prem Auti won the prize and authored this piece. Thank you, Prem - keep writing!