Black Friday is almost here. Time to get your e-commerce business ready for the busiest online shopping period of the year. If you haven’t had a chance to launch a full-blown marketing plan by now, here are five tips from Shopify’s Thea Earl that you can implement today to boost your sales this season.

1. Create ‘Abandoned Cart’ emails

According to Barilliance, 65% of online orders were abandoned last year. Think about it from the customer’s perspective — it’s easy to get distracted at checkout, or to second guess your purchase.

Shopify makes it easy to turn this missed opportunity back into an opportunity with automatic ‘abandoned checkout’ recovery emails. There are also a number of abandoned cart apps in the Shopify App Store you can use to create emails.

Time to implement: 5 minutes

2. Make sure your site is mobile ready

Pretend to be your customer and try shopping from your website using every device (that includes your browser, phone and tablet). According to IBM, last year 45% of all traffic in November and December came from mobile. You don’t want to lose sales based on something avoidable like poor formatting.

First, make sure you’re using a mobile responsive theme. Ask friends and family to review your site and share honest feedback. If there’s a quick fix to implement, do it. If it’ll require more than a few hours, park it until after the holiday rush.

Want feedback from a stranger? Use Peek User Testing to watch a free video of a stranger going through your site so you can observe their experience.

Time to implement: Varies

3. Fine-tune your shipping rates

Do all locations you ship to have an accessible shipping rate? If you have set weights to your products and have created shipping weight ranges, make sure you’ve added a rate that can support any weight. That way your customers will never be surprised at checkout with faulty shipping information.

Time to implement: 10 minutes

4. Add a sales banner

An easy way to advertise your holiday sales is to add a banner or update your existing header/images on your homepage. According to research done by NFR, 40% of customers researched sales and started holiday shopping as early as October.

If you need support creating a banner, Creative Market has a number of templates to choose from at a minimal cost.

Time to implement: 30-45 minutes

5. Send a simple sale announcement

Do you have special sales planned for Black Friday? Email your customer-base a short, to the point email highlighting these deals right now. Use a tool like MailChimp for a well-designed look like this one from Canvas Pop.

Time to implement: 30 minutes

Want to learn more? Check out the rest of Shopify’s free resources on getting your store ready for the holiday shopping season. Have a great holiday season and make sure your accounting integration is ready to handle all your incoming sales!

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Source: Xero