10 Tips to More Online Sales at Christmas

The following is a guest post from the Ecommerce Adviser

Make Gift Shopping Easy With Recommendations

Choosing the perfect gift takes time. Some of your customers may not know what to buy for their spouse, let alone for the office Christmas gift exchange! Make it easier for them to choose by giving recommendations. Common categories could include:

Ladies / Men / Mother / Father / Boy / Girl / Husband / Wife / Under 5s / Toddler / Under £25 / Under £100 / Stocking Fillers.

And the list could go on and on!

Use Your Thank You Page to Generate More Sales

When a customer buys online, they have put some trust into your site and they want to reassure themselves that they made a good decision. It may seem counter-intuitive, but one of the best ways for them to get that reassurance is to enter into another transaction with you – whether that is a further purchase or signing up to a newsletter.

So offer additional suggestions for complimentary products, either yours or your partners, on the thank you page. At least, recommend your email newsletter so they can be updated with your latest special offers.

Make Christmas Delivery Cut off Times Clear

A big concern for online shoppers is how late they can leave it to buy presents, and still be sure they will arrive before Christmas. One of the fastest ways to lose a repeat customer is for your Christmas gift delivery to reach them on December 26th!

Reinforce delivery date options throughout your site. “If you order by today we guarantee delivery by December 21st”.

You could use persuasive ways to show this on your site, perhaps with a countdown clock; have a look at sites like Amazon, Comet or M&S for ideas.

Provide a Range of Delivery Options

This is a good idea all year round, but it becomes especially important in the run-up to Christmas. If you can offer next day, or even same day, delivery then you can sell right up to Christmas Eve, and attract more last minute shoppers.

Make Returns Policies and Delivery Charges Clear and Easy to Find!

Cost of delivery, returns policy and how easy it is to find this information on your website, always play an important part in the decision to make a purchase. But at Christmas when your customer is buying a gift which may not fit; they already have; they don’t like – returns policies become even more important.

Make this information clearly accessible from anywhere on your website.

Offer Free Delivery

According to Econsultancy, more than half of Christmas shopping visitors to the top 30 retail sites said that they chose to buy from one retailer over another because they offered free delivery.
Displaying this on the homepage and elsewhere on the site immediately answers customer questions about delivery charges which increases trust.

Offer Gift Wrapping

If you don’t normally offer this service, it’s worth considering. It’s a valuable extra and can be used on the shopping basket page to bump up average order values.

Offer gift Vouchers

Gift vouchers can provide a useful alternative for customers who just don’t know what to buy. And they are great for last minute shoppers, as they can be delivered by email or SMS!

Make it Easy to ‘Save for Later’

Lots of people shop from work, but we’re often reluctant to actually pull out the credit card while sitting at the desk. Make sure that your visitors have a way to save their shopping cart items so that they can complete their purchase on their computer at home.

Approximately one third of consumers spend 2 or more days researching before buying.Make sure they can easily get back to the products they were interested in on your site.

Is your website ready for Christmas? If you would like more tips on taking advantage of Christmas with your website, call Jayne on 01235 424716 or visit the Ecommerce Adviser website.

How will the EU Cookie Laws affect you?

Today is EU Cookie Law Day, as the extended deadline for putting cookie compliance procedures in place has arrived.

Each website in the UK and EU has to give their visitors the option to accept or reject cookies used on the website. This is usually in the form of a pop up which demands acceptance of cookies before the visitor can continue, or a clear disclaimer explaining which cookies are used on the website, what they are used for and how they will affect the visitor if they continue using it.

This controversial phenomenon has arisen because consumers have finally got fed up of spam. It is through the use of cookies that web-users are tormented with advertising and spam that is related to their past surfing activities.

If you’ve been searching for a swimsuit online, you will probably find you will be bombarded with advertising for bikinis from Next, Debenhams or wherever. This is because a website you visited in the past (not even identifiable) deposited a cookie onto your PC or laptop which hung around gathering data about you. Having obtained the information it needed (swimsuits) it then waited for you to visit a suitable website where it could popularise the advertising slots with information about bikinis, as that is what it thinks you are interested in.

This is Enchilada Digital‘s definition of a cookie:

A Cookie is a text file that browser places on your computer’s hard drive on behalf of the website being served. The Cookie usually contains information, such as a user or session ID, that allows the website to remember who you are across multiple page views or browsing sessions. Most websites have 10 or more cookies. See this website for more information on cookies.

The legal powers that be then decided that enough was enough, and that cookies were bad news and should be stopped. Unfortunately not all cookies are bad: a bit like some bacteria are not bad for you. Some cookies are vital for the day-to-day running of a website, and without their presence your surfing experiences would be very dull indeed.

The web developing world have tried their best to explain this to our law-creating personnel, but, as is usual with internet-related things, they do not fully understand. They have managed to grasp that any e-commerce that happens on the web, shopping carts, paypal and the like, need cookies to be able to operate, and these have been given a class that determines them as ‘vital’ and are exempt from the EU Cookie Laws.

But there are still other cookies that are not detrimental to website users and do not create annoying spam. These cookies do collect data about the visitor, but the transaction is short-lived and usually has an immediate purpose, like sharing a blog post on your Facebook profile, or retweeting it on Twitter. Any sign up form to subscribe to a blog or newsletter list requires cookies where user data is collected, but again without this the transaction would not be possible, and the outcome is carefully controlled, especially if there is an opt-in mechanism required.

The greatest impact this Cookie Law has is on analytics. I collect data about my visitors via Google Analytics, so I can find out how many visitors I’ve had, where they have come from, which pages they visited on my site, what made them leave, what information they gathered and how often they return. This does require a lot of cookie use, and the data collected is quite extensive, but without analysing visitor use and understanding what its audience likes and wants, how can I improve my website to make it better for my visitors and advance my website’s purpose?

Meanwhile, to comply with the new laws, I have had to upload a plugin that produces an acceptance box for every page, and I have included a Cookie Compliance disclaimer at the top of my sidebar just in case. You would think surely is it really necessary to do all of this? Nobody would really be interested in every single little blog and website out there, all dealing with non-spam related cookies only used to enhance the website’s performance – but it would be disastrous for those who were ‘caught’ and had their sites taken down.  And I reckon little outfits are easier to target than the big corporate boys who have legal teams poised ready to react should the law enforcers come knocking on their doors.

What else can you do with a blog?

Click the fairy for some magical blogging help!

Someone on LinkedIn asked a question if blogs are businesses. Many of the answers wittered on about affiliate and sponsored advertising, as if making money made your blog a business. I sometimes wonder how much money these blogs actually do make… I personally ignore all advertising I see on blogs and just concentrate on the posts.

There is also the old adage that a blog can help your business (and I’ve written plenty about that before), but have you considered how a blog could be adapted to become an integral element of your business, rather than a useful accessory?

You could adapt your blog to become a blogsite (a website using a blogging platform such as WordPress that is self-hosted) to become a more substantial business tool. The alternative to having irritating adverts would be to write the pages to incorporate e-commerce (shopping carts) for visitors to buy e-courses, products, services, etc, because the blog is self-hosted, you can include any kind of HTML or web-programming for money-making functions.

Your entire blog can be adapted to become a very effective website, suitably programmed to attract SEO, internet and audience traffic, and RSS feeds to social media and elsewhere. The blog news-stream will attract a readership which can be directed to the other pages on your blogsite, which in themselves should be transformed into effective landing pages for email and Google Adword campaigns. I note there are effective sales pages programmes available for WordPress now.

Why not take advantage of a blog’s ability to become a membership site. The privacy and password protected posts and pages will enable you to gain paid-for subscriptions for members to view certain elements of your business. You could also build up a membership or forum, like a sort of ‘Inner Circle’, or even provide individual page access for particular subscribers or customers. This feature is extremely easy to set up, even for a WordPress.com blog (see my e-courses on the sidebar).

This proves I don’t see blogs merely as somewhere to post up your thoughts, or even somewhere to put up advertising, but certainly occupying a viable position for making a business successful.