Delivering the Complete Package

With Mother’s Day coming up, I was recently browsing the Vermont Teddy Bear and PajamaGram stores for some gift ideas. While looking at the items in each store’s Mother’s Day section, as a potential customer, something caught my eye – messaging about the free gift packaging, gift card, and other special items included with every order. A quick scan of the stores showed me that these free extras weren’t just a Mother’s Day promotion, but a key part of how they do business.

In past posts to the blog, we’ve stressed the importance of providing a good shopping experience to make sales and earn repeat customers, and have suggested sending freebies (like product samples) with orders to win your customers’ love. Vermont Teddy Bear and PajamaGram take this concept a step further, by adding special touches and extras that deliver the complete package – literally.

Over at PajamaGram, all women’s pajamas arrive packaged in a keepsake organza hatbox, with a Do Not Disturb sign, lavender-scented sachet, and gift card included. Pajamas for men, infants, girls and boys also come with their own special packaging and extras. Vermont Teddy Bear sends every bear as a “Bear-Gram,” complete with a gift box, gourmet chocolate, and a gift card. If you’re at a loss for words, both stores give customers the option to choose from a list of suggested gift messages (creative ones, I might add). These added touches are a good example of how merchants can deliver value to their customers, to gain not only their appreciation, but repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals.

So how can you tell what kinds of extras will be a hit with your customers? I asked Irene Steiner, vice president of marketing for Vermont Teddy Bear and PajamaGram, a few questions about the special packaging these stores include with each order, and for some advice to merchants who’d also like to amp up the shopping experience at their stores.

What made you decide to include special packaging with each order?

Since more than 95% of our BearGrams and PajamaGrams are sent as gifts, we feel it’s very important that all of our products be beautifully presented as complete gifts. We added the Do Not Disturb Sign and the lavender sachet along with every PajamaGram to help convey the sentiment of relaxation. We want the recipient to feel like they’ve just received permission to take a mini-vacation. And the free organza hatbox that comes with every pair of pajamas just makes everything look beautiful when it arrives, and is something women tell us they use over and over again. As for Vermont Teddy Bear, people also tell us all the time how much they love the box our bears arrive in, and that they get a kick out of the airhole. The chocolate that comes with our bears is gourmet Lake Champlain chocolate made right here in Vermont, just like our bears. Sometimes the bears do snack on the chocolate on their way to their new homes, however… it’s a bit of a problem.

Was there a time when special packaging wasn’t included with each order?

There was never a time when we didn’t include the special packaging. We have done catalog tests where we test saying “Free Packaging with Every Order” vs some other message and the “free packaging” message pulls best.

How do you decide what “extras” to include?

We have brand meetings every week to talk about how to make our brands even more relevant for our customers, which includes regular discussions about what to offer and when to change the free extras that come with our bears and pajamas. We also survey our customers with our ideas and let them tell us what they prefer.

Does your gift packaging and the extras included change over time, or for different holiday seasons?

We’ve changed the message on our Do Not Disturb Sign a few times and switched from bath salts to a lavender sachet a few years ago after we heard from several customers that they take showers, not baths. We are also talking about offering a holiday packaging option for our PajamaGrams this Christmas. We’ll be launching a survey soon to see what customers think of our new packaging ideas. For Vermont Teddy Bear, every time we try to change from our gourmet chocolate bear head, we hear that nothing tops it, so that’s been a mainstay for years.

I also notice you have suggested card messages, for different occasions. Can you tell me a bit about these?

Our customers use the suggested card messages a lot. We know because we all go help dress bears and pack pjs from time to time, and we proof the cards before they go out the door for delivery. We have an in-house copywriter who writes most of them, but our employees have fun making them up, too. We have a lot in poet-wanna-bes here! We also grab good ones that our customers come up with, too!

Can you offer any advice to merchants who may also be looking to deliver something extra to their customers?

Every business is going to have different customers with different needs. For us it’s critical because we want to stand out in a competitive gift business. Of course it adds cost and takes resources to pull it together correctly, but we’ve found that it’s a major draw in attracting both new and repeat customers. Customers also don’t want to receive free stuff just for the sake of getting something free – they’d rather have lower prices – so what you offer really has to make sense for your product line without throwing off your pricing strategy.

Big thanks to Irene, for sharing these suggestions and experiences.

Almost all stores sell items that could be gifts, whether it’s a gift for another person, or a gift for the shopper who places the order. If it makes good business sense for your store, you may also want to consider including free extras and special touches that deliver the “complete package”.

Smaller merchants that don’t have a large budget for extra items may choose to focus on presentation. For example:

• If you sell bath and spa products, you might want to "wrap" these in a waterproof carrying bag. Not only does the waterproof bag provide extra protection when shipping the order, but it’s something the customer or the recipient of their gift can use time and again. I once received something similar to this, and although the bath products have long since been used, the carrying bag gets pulled out every time I take a trip and need to pack items like shampoo, conditioner, and other bath products that could potentially spill while traveling.

• If you sell jewelry, you may already package this in a small box, or a sealed plastic bag. To give orders that extra touch, you also include a cloth jewelry pouch (something that can be used with the item purchased, or for other purposes), offer free gift wrapping, or both.

You don’t have to be a big store to add extra touches to your orders, just creative, and in-tune with your customers’ needs. Making it your business to go that extra mile can help you earn both new and repeat customers, and encourage them to spread the word about the extra thought and care that went into their order, beyond the point of sale.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

CNET blog features Yahoo! merchants

Yahoo! merchants Sarah Headrick and Sarah Rivera of Custom Made for Kids, who sell personalized children’s books, were recently featured in a CNET.com blog article that looked at women and online entrepreneurship. The authors and internet retailers shared their thoughts about the benefits of an online store and the ordering process, and how these are well-suited to their business needs. Check it out to learn more about their experience, and the ways in which they’ve used online tools and information to their advantage.

Taking a moment to stop by the Custom Made for Kids site and checking out their product’s virtual tour is also well worth the time, even if you’re not looking for a children’s book. Here, customers can enter a few custom details and then preview the first three pages of The First Adventures of Incredible You, allowing them to see the quality of the book and how it uses their information. Including a virtual tour for one or more of your store’s key products is a great way to give customers an in-depth look at what they’re ordering and can turn store visitors into buyers, by adding value to the shopping experience that goes beyond what even good product images and detailed descriptions can provide.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Do your photos need more zing? Give them a little “Bling”

It’s no secret that the quality of a store’s product images can have a significant impact on its sales. If you’ve invested time and effort to refine your product images, then you’ve likely found image editing can be a labor-intensive process, especially when removing and replacing backgrounds or improving the overall quality. So when I recently came across Vangie Beal’s ECommerce-Guide review of Bling! It, a new program Beal claimed could be used to easily accomplish these tasks in just a few minutes, I had to try it for myself.

As it turns out, Beal was right. While nothing compares to having professional-looking product photos to work with, Bling! It can help you correct less than stellar images with a few clicks of your mouse, and doesn’t require you to be a graphic design whiz. Most notable—and even fun—is the edge finding tool, which dissects your image into pieces (like a jigsaw puzzle), and allows you to adjust the tool’s level of detail as you work. Clicking inside of these pieces using the local brush applies a mask to these areas, and removes them from the final image.

When giving it a test run, I decided to use a slightly blurry photo that needed both a sharper focus and for the background to be removed. By using the edge finding tool and local brush to remove the background, setting a solid background color, applying the sharpen image option and adding a standing shadow, in about five minutes my photo went from this:

to this:

All-in-all, Bling! It requires a minimal investment of time to achieve very valuable results.

Bling! It can be downloaded as a 15-day free trial from Vertus’ website, and it sells for $49.95 (available for Windows only). Until February 21, 2008, Vertus is kindly extending a discount of $5 to Yahoo! Store blog readers. Use the coupon code BIYSTORE on the order page to take advantage of this offer.

Remember, having good product photos to work with is always the best option. Using a lightbox to achieve good lighting with virtually no background, or paying attention to lighting, focus, placement and angle, and positioning your product against a high-contrast, solid color background (if you plan to remove the background later) will only benefit you and save more time when editing your image. Often, though, product photos come from manufacturers and may not always be of the best quality. Bling! It is a nice option for merchants who would rather not re-shoot product photos, making it easy to display attractive images that can help generate sales.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

How’s Your Availability?

A merchant recently asked about how to insert a custom message between the item price and the add to cart button that would show the availability of the item. With this merchant, he was putting up items in his store for collectible die-cast cars that were not released yet. It makes sense for this merchant to provide notice to his shoppers of new products that will be released shortly—especially with regards to collectibles, though I’d imagine there are other vertical markets where this is true.

So not only does it make sense to do this to capture interest with prospective buyers, but it also makes sense to do this for all stores in terms of setting expectations with customers. I read in a recent white paper about shoppers expectations that seventy-two percent would be less willing to shop with a retailer when sales items are out of stock. That’s a big number and it goes beyond just being able to keep items in stock. Merchants need to set expectations about order fulfillment times in addition to shipping delivery times—especially with the holidays fast approaching. The last thing you want is a customer to buy an item expecting a pre-holiday delivery which you can’t meet because you didn’t specify the item will not be in stock for 8 weeks.

The good thing is the Store Editor templates already include a feature that serves this function—the Availability field. The Availability field for 3.0 Editor templates appears below the price but above the add to cart button—right where shoppers can see it.

Availability field appears in red text with a standard option.

The Availability field can be set in the Variables page with a global variable that applies to all pages (your standard product availability). You can then set this on a per page basis using the Availability field on individual pages. However, for this particular merchant, he wanted to have a value appearing there which wasn’t in the standard list of values. He wanted to notify shoppers of the estimated release date for the item. Database Upload to the rescue.

You can set custom values for Availability on a per product basis in the following way.

1. Make a note of the product IDs for which you wish to set a custom availability. Merchants can download their product database from Catalog Manager to set this for many products.
2. Create a spreadsheet with two columns: ID and Availability (or delete all columns except for ID and add Availability if using your product database from Catalog Manager).
3. Enter text in the availability column which you wish to appear on the product such as “Item is on backorder” or “Estimated release date January 2008″.
4. Save the file as .CSV format with the name data.csv.
5. Upload to the Store Editor using the database upload feature and click the Add button when uploaded. Note: Do not add this file as a Rebuild. This will wipe out your store contents except for the items and information in the spreadsheet. You can use the Revert feature if you make a mistake and Rebuild your store.
6. Publish your changes when ready.

Availability field with custom availability message.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business