Holiday Tips for Online Merchants

Since our job is to provide the platforms in which online merchants run their business, we routinely browse eStore websites and speak to our Clients to understand what’s working for them and their challenges. This year we were pleased to see many websites have a plan to make online holiday shopping more engaging. Sepcial events and holidays are a great way for online merchants to drive value to their customers and incent purchase decisions. We've provided a list of things we noticed and that we thought were great ways to service an online shopper during the holiday season.

Create a Holiday Theme
Don't you like how the Google logo changes on certain special events and holidays? Well even if it doesn't make you search more that day, it does remind you of the event and probably makes looking at the search logo a little more interesting that day. It’s the same for online shopping. Most of us shopping for a holiday event enjoy seeing some reflection in the website - and for repeat buyers it offers a unique shopping experience. Online merchants should consider their target audience and build themes to support various holidays.

Obviously this can be a slippery slope as not everyone celebrates the same holidays, so it should be done in a way that does not offend, and let's your shoppers know this is a unique time of year.

Keep it reasonable
Google just changes their logo, maybe that's enough for your eStore. Don't throw off your branding and keep it friendly on the eyes. The intention is to let shoppers know that you are aware of the season and that they'll find specials inside.

If you have the capabilities, build in dynamic content that can adjust the shopping experience based on the customer, originating visitor, or other factors.

Create Purchase Incentives
With the first part done, it is important to provide seasonal incentives to capture sales.
Some key incentives include:

• Blow out seasonal stock
• Free Shipping
• "Stocking Stuffers" (Bonus Items)
• Product Bundles
• Free Wrapping
• One-time seasonal promotions

Will it ship in time?
Worried the gift you bought someone will arrive before the big day? So are your customers. So, take every opportunity to remind shoppers of shipping timelines. You can use cut off times or counters to incent purchase decisions and remind them that the products will arrive prior to the special day.

We caution online merchants on this one. Although the intention is to remove concerns and incent shopping, if you can’t effectively check or anticipate shipping times you are running a risk of having unhappy customers with late gifts.

Chocolate Coins "Old Standard"
There are tons of reasons why people buy the same gifts year after year - not the least of which is the easy factor. With that in mind, online merchants should be extremely proactive during and leading up to the holiday season. Using marketing and promotional tools, you can connect back with past customers looking to purchase for the season. By creating relevant, targeted communications, customers are more likely to purchase the same product again or browse your site for something else.

We recommend targeting customers based on:

• Previous products purchase
• Geographic location
• Buying patterns
• Related and similar products

Even better, sign them up for a recurring purchase program that handles purchasing and shipping the same stuff once a year.

The Holiday Time Crunch
Back to the easy factor – time is already tight and the last thing anyone wants to do is shop online for hours upon end. With that in mind, make it easy for shoppers to buy from you quickly. Create custom categories and landing pages that promote products and provide gift ideas in a seasonal context.

Rather than losing the sale because someone can't choose a gift, provide a way for them to still do business with you. Gift cards are a great way to achieve this and should be considered during the holidays.

Another important thing to emphasize is the use of “Wish Lists” and popular product lists. Wish lists will allow gift receivers to browse your site and pick things out they'll enjoy - making it that much easier for the gift buyer. A Popular Products listing also helps reduce time browsing through product categories and searching. We recommend doing this across the board and at the category level.

Lastly, a great stocking stuffer idea: make sure "Also Boughts" (People that bought this also bought that") are being displayed to make it easy for someone to pick up some extra gifts.

Annual Strategy
Although we were pleased so many eStore websites had plans in place this holiday season, there were many that did not. There are many additional ways to create customer value and incent purchasing for special events and holidays, the important part of this is having a plan. Online merchants should plan all the special events in the 2009 calendar year and have a strategy based on several tactics.

Some tactics we didn’t look at here include:

• Advertising offsite (pay per click, print, and radio for example)
• Search Engine Optimization
• New domains or landing pages
• Online promotions only (for those with retail stores)
• Alternative payment methods

OrderDynamics plans to release a complete Dynamic Merchandising whitepaper next year to cover this topic in more detail. If you have any questions in the mean time, email us at blogs@orderdynamics.com.