What to do when you get too many orders online a list of do’s and dont’s.
Do
Use banners on the site to notify of delayed order delivery times- If you have to stop taking orders disable the buy now buttons, do not replace the site with 1 page. ( see our detailed post on this )
- If you do stop taking orders place a popup to be notified by email and text when you are open for orders again. Use it to build an email list.
- If your site is over run with customers due to some positive promotion talk to us about scaling ( you may need to replatform ) you certainly need ecommerce automation.
- Keep your customer informed more often in the order process.
- Watch out for customers delivering to business addresses, they may be doing this out of force of habit
- Keep live help manned for longer
- Introduce a support ticket system to deal with order queries
- Keep on top of your returns. Get them back into stock as fast as possible
- Keep communicating on social media
- Show stock level status on the site so as there is an expectation from the customer
- Have a policy around items that are out of stock
- Verify with the customer if an alternative will suffice
- Refund immediately saying its out of stock and you don’t when it will be in again
- Leave the choice in the customers hands
- Use a queuing service to throttle customers onto your site. Simuliar to what is used on ticket sales websites.
Do not
- Popup banners that cover the whole site
- Do not replace the site with 1 page. ( see our detailed post on this ) you will kill your SEO.
- Do not stop taking orders, most customers will wait if they know there is a wait involved.
- Do not turn off live help
- Do not leave returns until it all has calmed down
- Do not show everything in stock and know that eventually it will come in, set expectations.
- Do not leave customers hanging and having them contact you for issues that you already know they have
If your site crashes due to high volume you need to talk to us.