During the COVID-19 pandemic, the business of foreign trade e-commerce flourished. According to the latest analysis data from the US Department of Commerce, the sales of online retailers in the United States increased by 30.1% in the first half of 2020. In contrast, e-commerce sales in the first half of 2019 increased by 12.7% year-on-year. Traditionally, the last quarter is the peak season for retailers. As the COVID-19 pandemic has not yet ended, your foreign trade e-commerce website is now more important to your business than ever before. Many enterprises use Hong Kong servers to deploy their foreign trade e-commerce websites, providing services to the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. To maximize your sales during the upcoming holiday season, here are some tips for deploying an e-commerce website for foreign trade on a Hong Kong server.

1. View and test your website

Before the festival arrives, you should review the statistics of last year and draw lessons from them. Understand why your advertising campaign was successful or failed last year so that you can make a better plan. It is expected that the traffic will surge during the festival. To ensure that your Hong Kong server and website can handle this traffic, a load test should be conducted to ensure that your Hong Kong server has sufficient capacity to handle the peak traffic. You can also test your site using tools such as Jmeter, http://Loader.io, etc.

Before the peak traffic season arrives, please contact your Hong Kong server provider to obtain higher Hong Kong server bandwidth to be ready to handle sudden high traffic (if necessary) at any time. In addition, use tools such as Pingdom to monitor the website's uptime to avoid crashes.

2. optimize the speed of your website

According to relevant statistics, 40% of visitors will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. A one-second delay in page response can reduce the conversion rate by 7%. Therefore, improving website speed is crucial for increasing your sales and enhancing the user experience of your website. By using Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, you can test the speed of your website and get some actionable suggestions on optimizing it. Common strategies for improving site speed include using high-performance Hong Kong servers, optimizing images, clearing browser cache or enabling compression. High-performance Hong Kong servers can ensure the stability of basic attributes such as workload processing speed and network connection speed.

3.Optimize your mobile Experience

More and more customers use their mobile terminals to complete transactions. You need to ensure that your website can be browsed on mobile phones and purchased easily. At least, please ensure that your images respond quickly and your website design is mobile-friendly so that your customers can browse your website without pinching, zooming, excessive scrolling or other frustrating behaviors. To identify the mobile UX issues that shoppers may encounter, you can use Google's Mobile usability report and follow its recommendations to enhance the mobile experience of your website. Also, please remember to simplify the checkout process. Keep the procurement process simple. Cut out any unnecessary pages and fields. Provide guest checkout options for customers who are unwilling to create accounts for purchases. Minimize customer churn as much as possible.

4.Major changes are being made now

If you want to switch to a new Hong Kong server, try a new website layout, or migrate to other e-commerce platforms, please complete the process before holidays and peak traffic periods. With the increase in traffic and sales during the holiday period, any hardware failure, technical issue or site slowdown of the Hong Kong server may result in significant sales losses for you. If necessary, make these major changes now and conduct a thorough test before the vacation starts.

5.Protect your website

To protect customers' credit card information and personal privacy data, your website should obtain an SSL certificate. Display various trust badges in prominent positions on your website to make customers confident in their purchases. When using a Hong Kong server, one should also be cautious of DDoS attacks. Preparing a Hong Kong high-defense server or Hong Kong high-defense IP in advance can provide protection against DDoS attacks and prevent site disruptions during high traffic and high trading days.

6.Strengthen customer support

Whether Hong Kong servers or other servers are used to deploy an e-commerce website for foreign trade, the increase in festival traffic means that there will be more customer issues and concerns to handle. Customers may want to check if the product has arrived on time, or learn more about specific products, how to get a refund and exchange, etc. Putting all these common queries on the FAQ page can reduce the number of inquiries you receive. If possible, it is suggested to provide real-time chat, because customers hope to answer their questions quickly.