The $3.77 billion question: is your site ready for the Christmas rush?
Last festive season, Kiwis spent $3.77 billion online. That's up 11% on the year before, while in-store spending grew just 2% (NZ Post). Almost one in every four retail dollars now gets spent online.
And it's front-loaded. The four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday alone brought in $248.3 million, up 10%. After that, NZ Post saw demand ease through December as shoppers switched to convenience: quick delivery, click and collect, and getting it sorted before the cut-off.
So the opportunity is huge. The catch is that it doesn't wait for anyone.
Speed is a sales problem, not a tech problem
Shopify recently looked at how load speed lines up with sales across its actively selling stores. For every 100 milliseconds slower a store loads, conversion tends to be about 3.5% lower. Stores whose main content loads in 2.5 seconds convert roughly 30% worse than stores that load it in 1.5 seconds (Shopify).
A tenth of a second. You can't even blink that fast. Yet over a peak season's worth of traffic, that gap can add up to thousands in lost sales.
The good news? You don't need a new website to fix most of it. You need a clear look at where the leaks are, and the discipline to fix the right things first.
Five things worth checking before the rush
Speed on a real phone. Don't test on the office wifi. Load your homepage, a product page and your cart on a mid-range phone over mobile data. Big hero images, auto-playing video and apps you installed for a promo two years ago are the usual suspects.
Your checkout, step by step. Buy something from your own store. Count the steps. Are express payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay switched on? Do shipping costs appear early, or only as a nasty surprise at the end?
Mobile, thumb first. A big share of your browsing happens on phones. Can someone add to cart, find delivery info and check out one-handed? Is the add to cart button always within reach?
Delivery, front and centre. In December, delivery dates sell. Put your Christmas cut-off dates, click and collect options and returns policy where people can see them, not buried in the footer.
Your marketing plumbing. Check your abandoned cart and browse abandonment emails are actually firing. Make sure your tracking is working before you spend a dollar on Black Friday ads, and that those ads land on your fastest pages.
Quick wins you can make this week
With Black Friday just weeks away, this isn't the time for a redesign. It's the time for small, low-risk changes that make your site faster and easier to buy from. Most of these take a day or two, and they work on the traffic you already have.
Shrink your heaviest images. Compress hero banners and product photos, and serve them in a modern format like WebP. It's often the biggest speed gain for the least effort.
Switch off apps you're not using. Every app and tracking script adds load time. If it isn't earning its keep this season, turn it off.
Turn on express checkout. Apple Pay, Google Pay and one-click options let shoppers skip the forms entirely.
Show delivery costs and cut-offs early. Add a free shipping threshold and your Christmas cut-off dates to product and cart pages, so there are no surprises at checkout.
Make add to cart easy on mobile. A sticky add-to-cart button and bigger tap targets help shoppers buy with one thumb.
Check your abandoned cart email. Make sure it's switched on, sends within a few hours, and links straight back to the cart.
Send ad traffic to your fastest pages. Land Black Friday clicks on a quick collection or product page, not a heavy homepage.
Make one change at a time, test it on a phone, and lock everything down a few days before your promotions start. Bigger projects can wait until the rush is over, and the data you collect over Black Friday will tell you exactly which ones to tackle first.
Want a second pair of eyes?
Shopify Partners and peak-season obsessives - as your ecommerce specialists, we're offering a free Peak Season Health Check for online stores. We'll look at your speed, checkout and mobile experience the way your customers do, then send you a walkthrough of what's worth fixing before Christmas and what can wait until the new year. No jargon, no hard sell.
There's still time. Let's get you ready.
Get your free audit now!