What is a holiday countdown?
A holiday countdown is a timer on your eCommerce store that is counting down to a specific holiday. You could set one up to count down to Labor Day weekend (in Canada) or Thanksgiving or Christmas.Holiday sales
Things tend to slow down and speed up during certain months in the eCommerce world. While shoppers tend to save money for holidays and other expenses, businesses tend to not make as much money. This is the perfect time to introduce a holiday sale. You could set up a Canada Day sale, a July 4th sale, or even just a general percentage off for a special occasion (maybe your businesses' anniversary?). This can help you clear out some older inventory, bring in new stock and gain some new customers.How to add a holiday countdown
When you are on your dashboard you’ll want to click on the ‘+ Add Widget’ button. This will open a box that shows you all of the possible widgets you can add to your eCommerce site. Search for the widget by typing 'timer' or scroll until you find the one called “Countdown Promo Bar’.How to edit and customize the holiday countdown timer
Now comes the fun part-customizing your holiday countdown timer to look and act the way you want it to! The widget is divided into 5 tabs including location, content, design, behavior, and conditions.Location Tab
This tab lets you decide where to show the content in your Shopify pages. You can choose the page or pages for the timer to show on. The default is to show on all store sections, but you can show them only on certain parts of your store if you'd like. If it's a storewide sale I'd recommend leaving this to show on all sections.
The 'Location on page" selector allows you to choose where the holiday countdown will appear. You can use the drop-down to choose for them to appear: right after, right before, beginning of, end of, or replace a certain section on your site. You can select the URL to appear. Hover your mouse on your site and click to choose an element. Once a location is selected your widget will show up in the preview window on the right.
Content Tab
This tab lets you choose what content to show to your customers. It allows you to customize a message, add a call to action button, enable/disable a close button, and customize the timer template. For the message, we want to let customers know it's a discount for let's say our Labour Day weekend sale. Edit the text, but make sure to leave %TIMER% and %DISCOUNT_CODE% alone, as when the widget is live these will populate with the correct information automatically. Enabling or disabling the close lets you decide whether to add a button to let customers close the banner or not. The timer template can be edited to show only hours, or exclude seconds depending on how you'd like the countdown to appear. You can also enable and disable a time-out message which displays once time is up.Design Tab
The 'Design' tab allows you to edit the appearance of the holiday countdown bar. You can choose pre-designed themes or pick your own colours, font size and so on here. For those store owners with CSS background, or those who have developers they can add their own custom CSS or change the templates to work more specifically for their needs.Behavior Tab
The 'Behavior' tab allows you to set a discount code and either manage it externally or manage it through your eCommerce store. You can also enable/disable the timer portion of the message. Use this tab to set the timer to run to a specific date/time or have a time limit from when a customer first sees it. If we're counting to the end of a sale you'll want to use the specific date/time option. You can enable or disable the time-out message here.Conditions Tab
This tab lets you decide when to show your holiday countdown timer. You can set specific triggers and conditions on when to show it. You can have it trigger as soon as a page loads, and limit to only once per hour per shopper if you’d like. You can choose to show if a customer was previously looking at a specific product or if they've been on the site a specific amount of time. Or maybe you only want to show the holiday countdown timer during the week-you can do that here too. You can also set a schedule to run the timer, so that after Labour Day (or whatever holiday you choose) the widget becomes deactivated and no longer runs. Simply enable the schedule and set your dates and times for the holiday countdown timer to start and finish.
A/B testing
This tab lets you decide if you want to A/B test your Shopify testimonial notifications. It’ll allow you to enable or disable testing and also determine the percentage split of who to show the content to. The default is a 50/50 split, meaning 50% of the time customers see the testimonials, and the other 50% do not see the testimonials. This data can be used to compare to each other and determine whether the widget is helping you out.
By default, this widget is turned off. You can enable it yourself and also find out more about A/B Testing through this article.
