From the category archives:

eCommerce

Holiday Promotion Idea

by Brent on April 14, 2009

Holiday promotions on your eCommerce site are a great way to touch base with your customers and grab some extra sales in the process. Memorial Day is sneaking up fast. Monday May 25th, 2009 this year.  I wanted to share a promotion tip with you that I will be using on one of my eCommerce sites this week.

You can choose any type of promotion that you want. I am going to be using a discounted shipping promotion that I will outline below.  Now instead of offering the shipping promotion over the 3 day Memorial Day weekend, which is what I usually see, we are going to be offering the promotion a week early, so people purchase the products and have them delivered before the big 3 day weekend.

The big selling point and sense of urgency comes with the promise of getting your purchases delivered before the big weekend. Everyone loves 3 day weekends and everyone loves shipping discounts, so it is a win-win situation.

I am going to send an email to my customer base, on Friday morning May15th, outlining the shipping promotion and letting customers know that the last day to order and still guarantee deliver before Memorial Day is Monday May 18th at noon. The shipping discount will be in place from Friday thru Monday at noon as well. I know it seems a bit early, but I am offering a ground shipping promotion and I am taking into consideration a 5 day delivery time from UPS, just to be safe. I do not want to promise something and then not deliver on time.

I will send another last chance email on Monday morning May 18th with the cut off date for ground delivery being in just a few hours at 12 noon. As most of you already know you get the biggest boost in sales from a promotion like this the first day it starts and the day it ends. I like to send reminder emails to the customers the day before a really good promotion ends, just to give them one last chance to order before the promotion ends. Don’t get me wrong, I do not do this with every email promotion that I have, but I do save this technique for the really good promotions.

Here is a quick recap for those of you who are skimming really fast:

  • Memorial day: May 25, 2009
  • Last Day to order for ground delivery before the Weekend is Monday May 18 at noon.
  • Email is going out to customer base on Friday May 15th.
  • Last chance reminder email is going out on Monday morning May 18.
  • Shipping promotion will run from Friday May 15th thru Monday May 18th.

I know I didn’t give you much time to set this up, since this will start tomorrow, but I wanted to share this promotion with you anyway. It will work with anytime, so it will be good for the next holiday, 3 day weekend or event in the future.

If for some reason, you do not have a customer email list, you need to get one now so you can do promotions like this to your customer base. Call or email me for details.

If anyone has any spring / holiday promotions that they have used with success please share them below.  Leave me a comment if you want to know how this works. If I get enough interest, I will write a post with the results of the promotion.

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A few simple shopping cart etiquette tips that could improve your eCommerce site.

by Brent on April 3, 2009

checkoutI have owned this website design company for over 10 years now and I have seen my share of good ideas as well as quite a few bad ideas.  I can only make suggestions to clients about how I think things should be done and in the end the customer is always right. Even if they are completely wrong! Here are some thing that are good practice for the checkout process of an eCommerce website.

Show me what I put in my shopping cart and let me remove stuff easily.
When I add something to the cart I want to see it. Show me as much as you can. A thumbnail image, the product name that is a link back to the product details, price, sale price, quantity options and most importantly a REMOVE item button. That’s right… an easy way for the client to remove something from the cart.

Think about how people shop in stores. They walk around the store and they place things into a shopping cart. If they cannot decide on an item, but they are pretty sure they like it, they place it in the cart and walk around the store some more. Then right before they pay, they re-evaluate the cart contents and they might remove a couple items that they were not sure about. This happens all the time in eCommerce too and if you do not have a remove item button then you force the customer to empty the cart completely and start over or even worse the customer just leaves the site.

Don’t require cart registration.
To me this is basic eCommerce 101, don’t make it hard to your customers to give you money. That sounds like something everyone would understand. If you want to allow customer registration before letting them checkout, that is fine, allow it, but don’t require it. If you do allow it, then make sure it will give the customer some benefit. I have seen too many people just turn on and require cart registration just because the eCommerce system that they were offered it with no real reason. It really gave no benefit to the customer or the merchant.

Make the checkout pages clear and easy to follow.
Again it sounds simple, don’t clutter the checkout screens. Make them flow nicely from the top to the bottom where they proceed to the next step. This is not a place for large red warning text or paragraphs of terms and conditions. If you have information like this place a link to this data.

Show accurate shipping options and details.
Make it clear how much shipping is and offer only the correct shipping options for the Country or location that they are in. Always provide accurate shipping costs to the customer. A good way to lose a customer is to not define shipping costs. Don’t just put a disclaimer on the checkout page about how shipping costs will be calculated after the order is placed and the customer will be notified via email. I have seen that way to many times and it is a major roadblock for most customers. Would you give your credit card information if you did not know the final total of your order? I know I would have a hard time. Do the work on your site and get your products setup correctly so you can offer accurate shipping costs to your customers.

Reduce Weird Errors.
Errors are going to happen on the checkout screen, but make them with the customer in mind. Weird error codes and technical jargon is not going to help the customer checkout. If they forgot the zip code, let them know they forgot the zip code and don’t just say “Some fields are not filled out’. Just make it clear for your customers.

These are just a few quick eCommerce etiquette tips that can improve your website. If I left any out or if you have some to share please leave them in the comments area.

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How to change sales tax in the ShopSite eCommerce system

March 18, 2009

Sales tax rates are raising in California on April 1, 2009 by 1%. I am sure I will be getting a ton of calls with questions on how to change the tax rate in ShopSite. I made a quick video tutorial below that will show you step by step how to make this change yourself. [...]

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An easy way to track your sites conversion rates.

March 3, 2009

How is the Conversion Rate calculated?
The Conversion rate of your eCommerce site is simply the number of orders divided by the number of visitors to your site. This statistic is one of the most important statistics for you to track on your eCommerce site because a slight increase in your conversion rate can mean many [...]

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ShopSite Version 10 New Features

February 16, 2009

Every year or so ShopSite comes out with a new version of this popular eCommerce program. Version 10 was release in late 2008 and has added some nice features. I will pick a few of the new things that most people will notice or use and leave the abstract features for another time.
The most notable [...]

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