Plan for The Holiday Season with HCL Commerce
                     SPONSORED ARTICLE
PLAN EARLY AND TEST An executive conversation 
with Stephanie Heyward, 
EFFECTIVELY TO SUCCEED director of advisory 
DURING THE 2020 HOLIDAY services, HCL Commerce
SHOPPING SEASON
Any holiday shopping season requires a long runway of And, again, they need to have an effective search capability. 
strategic planning to fully prepare for the influx of customers Natural language processing (NLP), for example, can be highly 
who go online to shop for the holidays. This one is especially valuable because it allows customers to be specific in their 
challenging considering the global pandemic that has flipped searches by entering phrases like “most popular girl toys for 
ecommerce on its head. To discuss how months of preparation 8-10 years old.” 
will help retailers overcome challenges and provide satisfying 
shopping experiences throughout the holidays, Digital What practices can retailers put in place 
Commerce 360 spoke with Stephanie Heyward, director of now to ensure a successful 2020 holiday 
advisory services at HCL Commerce. shopping season?
Even if they don’t have a rich set of feature functions, the one 
What have been the most important 
capability all commerce solutions have—even home-grown 
lessons learned from recent holiday ones—is the ability to modify the catalog content. Right now, 
shopping seasons? enriching that data is something retailers should spend time on.
Retailers can’t start planning early enough. By June or July, they 
should be thinking about their merchandising efforts, building Search relevancy is incredibly important about conversions. 
content catalogs and creating marketing content. They should Businesses can get a lot of bang for their buck by improving 
ensure their online search relevancy is optimized, so customers search relevancy. One way to do that is to look at their search 
aren’t frustrated if they can’t find what they’re looking for. And analytics for searches that returned zero results. That is 
they should coordinate often with business teams. It’s not just essentially the customer telling the retailer exactly what they 
about IT being able to handle the additional load; it’s also about want to buy and either that retailer doesn’t have it—or more 
how prepared the business is—especially around marketing. likely, the customer couldn’t find it. And that’s just missed a 
conversion opportunity. When retailers improve search, they 
Specifically, retailers need to understand the types of improve the customer experience. They may not have time to 
promotions and dynamic personalization the marketing build out a new user interface before the holidays. But they 
team might be executing during this peak period to drive can do that.
differences in behavior. Those differences can sometimes lead 
to unpredictable spikes. Retailers want to make sure they’re They should focus on load testing and stress testing to ensure 
prepared to handle those spikes. the user experiences they do have run optimally and fast.  
As we all know, response time will impact the retailer’s 
What role does COVID-19 play in retailers’ conversion rate. 
abilities to prepare for the shopping 
season? And most importantly, retailers need to make sure they have 
given themselves plenty of time for planning, coordinating 
The best practices don’t change, but certain things have 
and testing, so they aren’t introducing unnecessary risk.
become more important than ever. Merchandising and 
content are more critical than ever because customers can’t 
go as easily into stores to buy last-minute stocking stuffers 
or physically look at products. Product data needs to be rich 
and categorization, taxonomy and metadata need to be good. 
Go beyond 
the transaction
Build the customer journey you want 
on the cloud platform of your choice
Learn more: https://hclsw.co/commerce