Creating a Better Holiday Rush

Holiday shopping season is now well upon us, and if your store has deals, online shoppers want to know about them. So what kinds of deals are shoppers looking for? According to survey results released by Shopzilla, this coming Monday:

• More than 80% of shoppers will be seeking discounts
• 69% of shoppers will be searching for free shipping
• 53% of shoppers will be looking for one-day promotions
• 32% of shoppers will be looking for buy-one-get-one-free promotions

While Cyber Monday kicks off the busiest part of holiday shopping season, merchants should remember that past holiday seasons have shown it’s not the biggest online shopping day of the year. In 2007, comScore reported that "Green Monday" — falling two weeks later — had Cyber Monday beat. So even though Shopzilla’s survey asked about Cyber Monday specifically, chances are that shoppers will be looking for these same things — and in higher numbers — during the second week of December and "Green Monday."

If you haven’t already done so, it’s not too late to consider some last-minute promotions and marketing efforts for the busiest shopping week of the year. Along with special discounts and sales, are you offering holiday bonuses like free gift wrapping and gift cards? How about free shipping? (Or at least free shipping on purchases over a certain dollar amount.) Do you have a special section of your store for holiday sales and promotions? How about gift sets?

If you’re offering holiday promotions or features, make sure these are evident both in-store and in ad campaigns. A good example to check out is American Bridal. This store’s sale information is almost impossible to miss, and shoppers can see right away that there are coupon codes for special savings, that free shipping is offered for orders over a certain dollar value, and that international shipping is also available.

While it’s late in the season for any major changes to your store, making sure your holiday deals and bonuses are clearly called-out to shoppers on your home page, section pages, product pages, and campaign landing pages can help you entice shoppers to buy from your store. If you have a clearance section, it’s a good time to move the section link to the top of your navigation menu, or to cross-promote it throughout your site.

It’s also a good time to check that your ad campaigns and any email marketing you have planned over the next several weeks speak to what shoppers are looking for this holiday season. Michael Mothner of Wpromote recently wrote about this and a few other last-minute ways to boost holiday search engine marketing results. A good takeaway from his article is making sure to incorporate holiday messaging in your PPC campaigns. If you’re offering freebies like shipping or gift wrapping, include it in your ad, and make sure the message speaks to the holiday season. (The example Mothner gives is changing an ad title from "Shoes on Sale Today" to "Holiday Shoe Sale" for greater holiday relevance.) He also writes about PPC daily budgets, last-minute link-building, call-to-action placement, and email campaigns.

If you’re a smaller merchant without a large budget for ad campaigns or email marketing, you can still promote your store and holiday offerings to friends, family, and past customers, and encourage them to spread the word. Using the Simple Promotional Email tool, you can create an email announcing your holiday deals, feature up to three items from your store, and include a coupon.

If you’re a Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant and have enabled Yahoo! Web Analytics, now’s a great time to create a scenario analysis for your checkout flow, and to watch this, visitor navigation paths, and bounce rates very closely. Creating alerts for key areas of site performance will also let you keep an eye on things without being glued to your reports. And, it’s a good idea to review top internal search terms to make sure you’re carrying the products shoppers are searching for. Once you know what these products are, you can make them easy to find by featuring them prominently on your home page or at the top of section pages. Cyber Monday traffic should call your attention to any problem areas that could be hampering your holiday efforts, and may also give you some good insight into visitor demographics and behaviors that can be used to refine your holiday marketing.

As you get ready for the busy weeks ahead, we’d like to wish you all a great holiday shopping season, and a happy Thanksgiving.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

Optimal Cross-selling for the Holidays

With the ups and downs of the market, it’s no wonder that online merchants are expecting a challenging holiday sales season this year. This makes it more important than ever to optimize every sales opportunity. If you haven’t done so yet, now is the time to focus on increasing order size by effectively cross-selling products for the holiday season.

Merchants with Yahoo! Store, Merchant Solutions Standard and Merchant Solutions Professional plans can take advantage of the cross-sell feature in a several ways:

Add-ons

If you sell products that require batteries or other accessories, add them as a cart cross-sell for those products. This way, once someone has made that first step towards purchasing, you can offer them a product that they’re going to need anyway — and they might as well buy it from you! In the case of batteries, even if they don’t need them for something they bought at your site, it may remind them that they didn’t buy batteries for a previous purchase at another store and baddabing! — you’ve just increased your order size by several dollars.

Product pairs

Last Christmas, it seemed like every kid who wanted a Hannah Montana doll also asked for a High School Musical doll (my four nieces with the same gift request has got to be a pattern!) but auto-suggestions can’t predict what new items will be hot together this year. For your newest items, go to a brick and mortar store and see how they are merchandising. Also, keep an eye on your first few orders — they will help you determine some dependable cross-sells that you can set up using cross-sell rules. Once your sales of these items are on a roll, you can opt to auto-suggest only.

If purchasing trends show that a set of items often sell together, you may also want to create a special gift set out of these items. For more about gift sets, check out a previous blog post, “Giving the Gift of Increased Order Size to Yourself.”

Unique products

Shoppers on your site may not be specifically looking for some of the unique items you have in your store, but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t want them if they knew about them. I received a set of tools last Christmas from a relative who saw them while waiting in line at an auto parts store checkout (aka “cross-sell nirvana” for brick and mortar stores). Had that product not been at the checkout, he never would have thought to buy it for me, and I’d still have no pictures hung on my walls.

During the holidays, shoppers are looking for a range of gifts for a range of people. Shoppers also tend to be much more open to suggestions, unlike other times of the year when they tend to focus on a particular purchase. Think about it — how many relatives do you have to buy for? Wouldn’t it be great if you could get shopping done for multiple people at just one store? And for how many of them do you have no clue what to get? Shoppers are intent to buy, but not necessarily intent to buy one particular item, and the suggestions you give can be quite welcome to a shopper in a gift-giving conundrum.

Once the holidays are over, you should revisit your cross-sell options to make sure they still make sense. Less targeted cross-sells (like unique products) may be better placed on your home page or a featured items page, rather than distracting a customer on their path to making a purchase. It’s also a good time to turn on auto-suggest if you haven’t already, since all of your traffic and purchases from the holidays will be leveraged by the system to make auto-suggestions. If you’re still hesitant about using auto-suggest, keep in mind that, on average, auto-suggested cross-sells drive 30% higher revenue per order than merchant-created cross-sells (manual rules).

If you’re not using Cross-Sell, the holidays are a great time to start! To find out how you can get started, check out our online Cross-Sell help section.

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business

Giving the Gift of Increased Order Size to Yourself

I was recently reading another great FutureNow post by Bryan Eisenberg on their 2007 Retail Customer Experience Study. The study surveyed leading online retail sites on factors of customer experience such as quality of product copy, quality of product images, presence of return policy, and so on. Towards the bottom of the post you can see which sites are considered leaders in customer experience.

I noticed one of my favorite stores, SurlaTable.com, listed as the leader in the Food category. Now I love Sur la Table, so I’ll admit I was somewhat biased in looking at their site for some best practices. One immediate striking thing about the site is how completely it is geared up for the holidays.

The majority of the home page serves to guide visitors into 4 main sections and calling out “gifts with free shipping” is a smart way to get click thrus from shoppers who may be looking for a deal. The side navigation is also made over for the holidays with main sections for holiday foods and holiday gifts.

What caught my eye though on the home page were the gift sets. Looking at this page, the clever marketers at Sur la Table have really packaged existing products in such a way to make them into a gift set or ensemble. So why is this so great you ask? Now shoppers don’t have to hunt for the perfect gift in a sea of products—they only have to know what the person may like, what type of person they are, what their personality is—an easier prospect likely. Sur la Table has grouped many of these sets around celebrity chefs. Needless to say, gift sets are also a very smart way to increase average order value.

Gifts sets from Sur la Table.

While browsing the gift sets, I remembered a Yahoo! merchant I had visited some time back, Lawrence Ames, who was doing much the same thing on his Yahoo! store. In the hopes of passing along some of his experience to other merchants, I asked him some questions around how this works on his site HonestFoods.com.

Gifts sets from Honest Foods.

How long have you been selling online and with Yahoo!? How would you describe the products that you sell?

We’ve been with Yahoo! Store since the beginning. We started with Viamall as a beta test site when they started (1996), and stayed with Yahoo! after Yahoo! acquired Viamall, in 1999.

At HonestFoods, we sell all natural gourmet foods and gourmet gifts. We primarily sell the foods we love or foods we make. As foodies, we source out small artisinal manufacturers and try to get to market things that otherwise you wouldn’t find. Good examples of some very strange items include our Creole Pepper Sauce, which won First Place as Best Louisiana Style Pepper Sauce, but has very limited distribution.

How long have you been doing gift sets?

We’ve been doing Gift Sets since we opened, before the online world began, in 1982.

How do you come up with ideas for what to sell together?

Items are grouped by themes, generally. For example, our Beer Lover Gift Set has ten items made with beer. We have a Grill Master Gift Set for the Grill Master Guy! Lots of fun combinations!

I see you ship in “holiday” gift boxes. Do you think this helps sales vs. just using a regular box?

I think it is nice to offer the Holiday gift box during the holidays, but they really only sell at Christmas. The Holiday boxes are from $1.55 - $3.75 delivered.

I think that the cost is easily recovered, because you have to compare it to “no gift box” which isn’t fun to open, or “gift wrapping” which takes time and materials, and when not done well, can look less than professional. I firmly believe that when we sell products online, we are not so much in the product sales business than in the customer service business. Sure, we can sell ABC widget, but the customer is looking for something more. That something may be convenience, fast service, etc, but is isn’t just about acquiring an item. We need to provide that “something extra”. A lot of times, I think they just want to feel as if someone is paying attention to them, which is why those confirmation emails, your product has shipped emails, etc. are SO important.

Where do you get the boxes?

Two sources: We custom make our box for some of the gifts. We use our Packaging Distributor for other ones. They stock them. Most good packaging distributors have in-house stock of holiday gift boxes.

Do you include anything inside the gift box to encourage the recipient to become a customer?

But of course! Our Mardi Gras In A Box comes complete with Mardi Gras beads and a complete menu for a Mardi Gras feast, including appetizer, main courses, and dessert!

Do you find these gift sets sell throughout the year and not just the holidays?

Yes, they are good sellers all year round, but the Holidays are really the best!

Thanks Lawrence for sharing. So while gift sets may not work in for all merchants, a quick check of some sites I know showed some merchants taking advantage of this tactic:

• baby blankets, apparel, and other gift sets at Flying Peas
• sports team and political cufflink gift sets at Cuffflinks.com

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Playing Cupid, 50 Times a Minute

Vermont Teddy Bear’s Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Hosted Website Braces for Record Valentine’s Day

With about 30% of its year’s business riding on the brief Valentine’s Day holiday, Vermont Teddy Bear predicts its most intense “peak” season in the company’s 26-year history.

“We market mostly to male last-minute shoppers, and because Valentine’s Day falls on a Wednesday, we have a sort of ‘perfect storm’ that means the vast majority of our orders will be taken in just a handful of hours on two very busy days,” says Vermont Teddy Bear Company CEO Elisabeth Robert.

The company reaches its target customer (whom Vermont Teddy Bear refers to internally as “Late Jack”) through thousands of live radio spots, television commercials, online ads, emails and direct-mail catalogs. The company’s Valentine’s Day teddy bears, like “Loverboy” with a heart-shaped tattoo, or “Bear Naked” wearing nothing but a fig leaf, are hand-made in Vermont and are a popular alternative to flowers.

Since first venturing online in 1997, Vermont Teddy Bear has continuously been hosted on the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions ecommerce platform.

“We’ve asked Yahoo engineers to brace themselves for a top pace of about 1,500 orders per website per hour,” says Robert. That’s about 50 orders per minute, combined.

“With the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions e-commerce platform, Vermont Teddy Bear will have a worry-free peak Valentine’s season. Supported by Yahoo!’s world class network, Merchant Solutions is reliable and scalable, and handles billions of dollars in transactions each year, including busy holiday and event-based sales spikes,” said Jimmy Duvall, director of e-commerce, Yahoo! Small Business. “Yahoo!’s e-commerce solution is designed to easily accommodate surges of last-minute shoppers.”

In February the company’s staff temporarily swells from about 250 people to over 1,250 to handle the expected Valentine’s Day volume. Extra UPS trailers line the long driveway at Vermont Teddy Bear’s Shelburne, Vermont, headquarters, waiting to be loaded.

Customers can order any time and have their package held to arrive precisely on February 14th, Valentine’s Day. But in a quarter century selling Valentine’s gifts to men, the company has learned many guys put off gift buying to the very last moment. In recent years Vermont Teddy Bear has stretched operations to the limit to satisfy that last-minute demand - - accepting orders as late as 10 pm Eastern the night before, for guaranteed arrival on Valentine’s Day.

Peak season is complicated by the fact that one of the company’s sister brands, PajamaGram.com, launched in 2002 and also hosted by Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, is now the Vermont Teddy Bear Company’s fastest-growing line of business. This year, for the first time, PajamaGram eclipsed parent company Vermont Teddy Bear in annual sales transacted online. Between all its brands, over 67% of the company’s sales come in across the web.

“The amount of business we transact online has grown more than thirty-fold since we launched our first website a decade ago,” says Robert, “Yahoo! has always been there to make sure our sites are up and performing well. This Valentine’s Day, we’ll sell more gifts online in a couple hours than we used to in the entire month of February. And if we can make a few hundred thousand sweethearts happy on Valentine’s Day, then we’re happy.”

About the Vermont Teddy Bear Company

Each Vermont Teddy Bear Company Bear-Gram gift includes a customized Vermont Teddy Bear accompanied by a personal greeting card and candy treat, all packaged in a colorful gift box with an air hole. Orders are placed by calling 1-800-829-BEAR or by shopping at VermontTeddyBear.com

The company’s fast-growing PajamaGram brand is a gift delivery service where customers can pamper their loved ones by sending pajamas and spa products in luxurious packaging by calling 1-800-GIVE-PJS or shopping at PajamaGram.com.

The company also offers floral gifts from Calyx Flowers, gourmet foods and sweets from the TastyGram Company, and handbags and accessories from Gift Bag Boutique.