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Selling your products online during the festive season can boost up your sales exponentially, but at the same time requires you to be fully prepared before selling.  As the records show, online shopping in Australia will increase by 17.9 per cent to $16 billion in 2012, and is predicted to grow to $26.9 billion by 2016 at a compound annual growth rate of 14.1 per cent. (*Source - PwC and Frost & Sullivan report)

Below are the key parameters which can help increase sales online during festive season:   

1) Attractive Website - Online visitors want a website which is attractive, user friendly and easy to navigate with all links in good working condition. Each year there are new fads, styles and collections so be up to date and remove your old content and out of date product. A badly constructed website should not become the reason for your failure.

2) Gift Certificates - The visitors should be given the option of buying gift certificates; make sure to use this as a selling point. Gift certificates are a great way of increasing online holiday sales. They can be issued online or sent to recipients via regular mail.

3) Professional Online Shopping Platform - You can make use of several professional online shopping sites that let you sell products, but make sure that they be given festive theme banners and buttons so as to spread the word in as many ways as possible. The banners and buttons should be linked to any special offers you have. Giving customers a reason to visit your website is important for increasing your online sales.

4) Safe payment process – A safe checkout process setup like Paypal or eWay allows your buyer to buy securely. Adding an SSL certificate to your web store gives your buyer the confidence to transact business. Trust and security can help improve your conversions.  

5) Search engine optimization – Your website should be search engine friendly. Do not wait till the end for creating new content, as Google might take time to crawl your new content and index the pages. Use the tools available or you can take the help of SEO services available.

7) Multiple shipping addresses - You can offer services like multiple shipping addresses so your buyers can ship directly to an alternative address while making sure you send the gift there on time.

8) Use of Social media - Social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest are of significance to gift buying decisions. So, be present in all social media platforms to promote your online store.

9) Festive theme for the Store - You can setup new styles and banners for Festive season. Set up a countdown for festive season which is very easy.

10) Promotions - You can setup special Google AdWords Campaigns just for Festive season and help drive Festive traffic. Choose a SEM partner and discuss with them that you will be competing with lots of other businesses for customer attention. A well prepared and funded online SEM campaign can definitely boost your online product sales.

There are number of online shopping platforms like Magento, Volusion and Bigcommerce which make your work easier. You can just wait and watch the sales rolling in for your store with the help of these online shopping sites.  You can sell more with their latest mobile version using Twigmo technology, even manage your store remotely from your iphone. These online selling sites accept all major credit cards and provide ratings and reviews. Some sites even provide your own unique advertising pages and you need not bother about adding SEO packages as they handle it all themselves with no commission to pay.