12 Posts of Christmas: Tip 10—Give the Gift of Convenience

With fewer shipping days left in the season, it’s time, if you haven’t already done so, to start pushing gift certificates*. Offering gift certificates to buyers is very appealing for obvious reasons: no shipping deadlines to beat, no fear of buying the wrong gift, etc…. A few places you can consider promoting gift certificates:

• Home page: up front and center is a good place to catch your shopper’s attention. Incorporate a promotional graphic in your header and link it to your gift certificate page directly.
• Shopping cart: consider swapping out one or more of your cross-sell items with gift certificates. You can change the text headline for the cross-sell area to appeal to the convenience of gift certificates such as “Finish shopping for those last few hard-to buy people on your list” or something along those lines.
• Custom 404 error page: while you should have links to your category (section) pages and maybe even to your best-sellers, you may wish to promote gift certificates as well.

Here are a few examples of sites with fairly prominent promotion of gift certificates, but likely any retail site you visit this time of year will have something if they offer gift certificates:

• Banana Republic
• Pottery Barn

Post Holidays Suggestion: If you are really ambitious, you can consider printing gift certificate vouchers as an option for buyers that wish to present the certificate in person. To do so, you would need add a checkbox to your checkout page that allows buyers to select if they wish to receive a printed gift certificate. You would also need to instruct buyers to enter their own email address in the recipient field for the gift certificate since the code is sent to the recipient automatically (and then there would be no surprise). You can then print the gift certificate code onto a card that you send to the buyer at the Billing Address. You can create your own gift certificate template or use a pre-made template to print on good card-stock, or hire a printer to create custom ones for your store where you add the amount and the number.

Learn more about gift certificates.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

* Gift Certificate functionality is available only to merchants with Merchant Standard or Merchant Professional packages.

12 Posts of Christmas: Tip # 9–How Many Online Shopping Days till Christmas?

Don’t let buyers view your store as the Grinch that store Christmas. Just as WISMO (Where is My Order?) questions are the most frequently asked questions from buyers after an order, WIGMO (When Will I Get My Order?) questions are the most frequent in the weeks leading up till the holidays. Make it explicitly clear what your “order by” date is in order for buyers to receive their orders in time for Christmas. Be sure to factor in whatever time it may take for you to process and fill orders. In other words, if it takes you two days to get an order shipped, back up the final “order by” date by that amount.

Some places to put this information:

• home page in the header or footer
• final-text area of section (category) and item (product) pages
• Shipping options sections in checkout (Checkout Manager makes adding fields easy)

Example of adding a custom field with shipping times to checkout

Also, if time permits, you may wish to contact buyers that select shipping methods that would likely arrive after the 25th. This could be a conscious choice on their part, but it could also be a mistake. Taking a moment to confirm this with them could not only save some angry calls (misdirected though they may be) but it could also win you some loyal customers.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

12 Posts of Christmas: Tips 7 & 8–Create Gift Categories and Speed Buyers to Them

Editor’s Note: When I started this topic I had a general sense of what I wanted to cover but not exact details of all posts. In retrospect, I should have started with these two posts as they do take some time and may be coming too late to affect holiday sales this season. Maybe that is unofficial tip #13: The Holidays come up fast on you—start getting ready early, me included.

Gift Categories

The thing I like about holiday shopping in a department store is the way products are logically grouped for men, women, children, home, etc . . .. The thing I dread, especially as a last-minute shopper, is once I determine which section I need, there is still a dizzying array of choices. How do I know what is a best-seller? How do I know which are recommended over others?

Fortunately in the online store world, you are not bound the physical constraints of a store—you can arrange your products in as many categories and sub-categories as you wish. And while the holidays are no time to revamp your entire store navigation, you may wish to create new gift categories based on your top-sellers (you can get your top sellers from the Sales report available under Statistics in the Store Manager). Once you have the products, try to sort them into typical gift categories such as Gifts for Him, Gifts for Her, Gifts for the Kids, Stocking Stuffers. If your products don’t sort well into categories, you can consider organizing them at traditional gift price points such as Gifts under $20, Gifts under $50, Gifts under $100, and The Sky’s the Limit.

Once you have how you will organize your products, and which products will appear, you can create the new categories to have them appear in your navigation. You can also consider a graphical holiday-themed image map to link to the new categories or revising your home page to feature these new categories. Two great examples of this are REI.com, and Pottery Barn.

Getting Buyers to Gift Categories

If you create special gift categories there are several ways you can get buyers to them. One clever way is to incorporate a jump menu from a drop-down box. Buyers can select the category and will be brought to the page you link to each.

Copy and modify the following code to use your categories, and change the values to the page names for your categories (e.g. gifts-him.html, gifts-her.html).

<select size=”1″ name=”gift-menu” onchange=”document.location.href=this.value”>
<option selected value=”">Find the perfect gift  </option>
<option value=”link1″>Gifts for Him</option>
<option value=”link2″>Gifts for Her</option>
<option value=”link3″>Gifts for Kids</option>
<option value=”link4″>Stocking Stuffers</option>
</select>

After modifying the code, you can place it anywhere you wish the menu to appear such as the header of your home page or on a special holiday landing page you create.

If you can’t use this tip in time for the holidays, keep it handy for the next seasonal sale such as Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. You can use the same technique and only change the text for the season.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

12 Posts of Christmas: Tip 6 Don’t forget the Batteries

As the parent of a boy that often gets electronic gizmos for gifts, my favorite gift-givers are those that are extra thoughtful and include whatever batteries the gift may require. There is a reason that batteries are often stocked in the checkout lanes—they are a nice way to provide a reminder to the buyer they may need batteries, and a great way to bump up the average order size.

You can do the same thing in your own checkout if you are a Merchant Standard or Merchant Professional account holder. These packages include the Cross-Sell feature where you can merchandise specific items in your shopping cart depending on the item the buyer has added to their cart. If you sell electronic goods, maybe you would cross-sell batteries (if you sell them) for items that require batteries.

You can choose a few different strategies depending on your buyers and the products your store sells. If you sell DVD camcorders for example, you may wish to cross-sell DVDs, memory cards, camera bags, or other accessories. The higher cost items can really boost your average order size but you may have to offer discounts or other incentives to convince buyers into adding these items on top of a high-ticket item; the Cross-sell features allows for both a dollar amount off or percentage discount. You can also try to convert lower cost items by cross-selling low-cost items and changing your cross-sell headline to something like “Don’t forget the stocking stuffers” (you can even add an image to appear before or after the text using HTML). You may even wish to review past orders to see which items if any are commonly purchased together. Whichever route you choose, try to figure out what items are the “batteries” for your type of products.

Learn more about the Cross-sell feature.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business