52 Ecommerce Holiday Tips | Vastplanet.com

I prepared a list of the top 52 holiday tips for e-commerce store owners and broke them up into sections; Web Design, Customer Service / Operations, Gift Services, Promotions / Social Media, Advertising / Search and Opportunities / Partnerships. The current economic forces will test online retailers in many ways and the sooner you plan for the holidays the better positioned you will be for success. Pour yourself a big cup of coffee and after reading, please let me know your thoughts.

Web Design

• Shop at Your Store – take a moment to locate a popular item and purchase it. How was the experience? would you shop? Would you buy?
• Checkout Process – Is it clear to understand? Does it mirror the look and feel of your online store?
• Navigation – reorganize the order of your sections and subsections in order of importance. Customers won’t have much time to shop and this will aid them.
• Order Confirmation Page – Integrate Your Twitter, Facebook Fan Club Page and Store Newsletter signup into it. Customers wil be more inclined to join after purchasing.
• Page Load Times – are your images and code optimized, customers will have little patience.
• Related Items – an important part of the shopping process and should be integrated prior to the holidays. If you can integrate automated intelligent systems it will allow higher conversions.
• Cross Sell – Inside the shopping cart you have another opportunity to introduce some complimentary products and encourage you to consider.
• Product Reviews – essential in todays e-commerce, customers rely on other shoppers for advice vs. the online store’s and provides a communication point between you and the shoppers. My advice is to leave reviews that are not stellar alone to show the honesty in the reviews.
• Security Seals – these conversion boosters help give consumers who are unfamiliar with your store a 3rd party to verify you are a true business.
• Customer Testimonials – seems obvious to add but can really help with the buying process. Similiar to product reviews but more focused on overall buying experience.
• Holiday Update – always a great time to evaluate your overall design and merchandising and you still have time to make modifications and enhancements that will provide a positive ROI.
• Holiday Graphics – consider adding a merchandising banner or graphic box that can be updated during the holiday season with your promotions. You can also tie this together with a holiday logo if you want to set yourself apart.
• Add to Cart – an extremely important button – does yours pop on the page? If it’s buried at the bottom of the page it’s time to fix that situation before it can cost you sales.
• Search – with 40% of internet users heading straight to the search box how good are your results?
• Shopping Cart Abandonment – why are they not completing the transaction, you can utilize additional tools to understand this revenue loss.

Customer Service / Operations

• Holiday Shipping – plan special rates that are easy to understand and provide ETA chart with cut off dates for customers on the shopping cart. Here are important dates to know:
  • 11/27 Black Friday
  • 11/30 Cyber Monday
  • 12/07 Green Monday (expect heavy traffic)
  • 12/14 Brown Monday (last day for free shipping)
• International / Other – don’t forget about Canada, Military bases, Europe, etc, in your holidays plans.
• Shipping & Handling Charges – if you can eliminate these and add to shipping costs it’s better in the long run as consumers will be able to understand the overall costs. Of course if you sell heavy products or other special situations this wouldn’t apply.
• Return Policy – review and consider a no-hassle return policy.
• Add Live Chat With Analytics – Consider calling it Personal shopping Advisor.
• Post Your Full Contact Information and Hours of Operation. Remember, something small like leaving out your address or phone number can make a customer leave immediately.
• Consider adding in a personal note in the box thanking the customer for the order – include a coupon to give to a friend.
• Order Management – be prepared for additional volume with an order management system.
• Order Fulfillment – are you maxed out in your current operation, might be a great time to consider another company to handle the pick, pack and ship part of your business.
• Plan your holiday budget now and consider; site upgrades, graphic design, technology enhancements, seo, ppc ad budgets, email marketing ad general advertising.
• Prepare for increase in orders by organizing additional staff now.
• Make sure credits cards have plenty of room for additional advertising expenses.
• Store locators – are they clear to find? Consumers may skip on shipping costs and drive to the store to see in person and purchase immediately.
• Consider “Bill me later” solutions, Paypal, Google checkout and other creative ways to eliminate the fear of over spending.

Gift Services

• Buying Guides – provide helpful gift buying guides by organized by categories: men, women, kids, etc
• Create Holiday Gift Suggestions by Price – $10, $25, $50 etc. as consumers will be on budgets.
• Last Minute Holiday Suggestions – great idea to choose some rapidly shipped options for the time constrained consumers.
• Gift Certificates – why not encourage people to purchase gift cards, it’s an easy gift solution.
• Gift Wrap – set yourself apart and offer Free Gift Wrap or a low cost option under $3. Don’t fall into the trap of charging $5+ as many customers will not take the option and may abandon the purchase all together. Show photo of giftwrap to resolve a question up front.
• Create Bundled Products of 2 or 3 items. Allows you to make a special deal when you buy a popular set.

Promotions / Social Media

• Coupons – consumers want them and this will be a key driver this holiday season. Consider Free Shipping, Save $X when you spend $Y and % off scenarios. Place short timelines on them to encourage buying in advance. Publish exclusive coupons in Twitter, Facebook Fan club pages.
• Email Newsletters – plan your email newsletters now and prepare in advance, consider Cyber Monday and other key buying events.
• Twitter – if you don’t already have one for your company do this today and start talking about your brand.
• Facebook Fan Club – gaining popularity each day, you need to set this up as a place for customers to group together. Think social networking for your most important customers, why wouldn’t you want to do this?
• Addthis.com – add this small piece of code to your web site and will allow shoppers to share items they find on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.
• YouTube – if you can make product demonstration videos it will improve your conversions. Also, a holiday version would be nice welcoming the visitors
• Blogs – create a blog and start talking about your brand online. When you are ready to put the message out on your holiday promotions and special events your audience will be ready to receive. Another great tip is to pre-write your blog posts now and will automatically post during the busy holiday period.

Advertising / Search

• SEO – time to get into what your strategy is, do you come up on the first page for your key terms? If not, time to revisit this and recommend a full optimization pre-holiday by a firm who doesn’t go with the slogan “we guarantee first page rankings..”
• PPC – no time like the preset to organize your campaigns and ad groups. Review your conversions, Ad copy, landing pages and utilize the help of a professional firm to generate additional long tail keyword strategies to maximize your return on investment.
• Other placements – consider Facebook advertising, Retargeting, Ad Networks and Content Networks to maximize coverage
• Affiliate Marketing – a terrific way to extend your sales efforts on a pay for performance model. A well managed affiliate program has the potential to contribute up to 20% of a retailers overall revenue and provide a positive ROI.
• Shopping Feeds – check for accuracy. Are they showing up in the correct places?

Opportunities / Partnerships

• Form a Partnership – Time to join forces and consider a strategic partnership to broaden your marketing efforts. Have you ever received a package and noticed a card in the inside with a special offer to shop at another retailer? For example, you might want to also place this information on your order confirmation email and in return your partner will do the same. You both benefit.
• Niche Online Store – create a new store to capitalize on a rising market trend and benefit during the holidays. You can go to Google Trends and get some Ideas on what’s popular.
• Listen – read your comments from customers and if they were asking for additional product lines this is the time to add them.
• Analyze Competitors – Go back to last holiday – You can go to archive.org and view your competitors strategies as they appeared on the web sites. Archive.org captures web sites and will give you a great idea on what has already been done.
• Analytics – Install / Revisit Google or Yahoo Analytics and get to know what customers are doing. Understand 0 search results, high/low bounce rates, popular pages and traffic sources, etc. Of course much more to this bullet point.

Overall, I hope that you found a few tips that will help you prepare for the holidays and if I can help you with organizing a personal strategy for your online store please contact me. If you liked this post please subscribe via email, RSS, Twitter @michael vorel, Twitter @vastplanet and encourage you to leave comments, additional tips and personal experiences below. Ok, ready to rest my brain…

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…