Ecommerce Blog

8 Tips to Sell More During the Upcoming Holiday Season

Published on September 28th, 2009 by Mitchell Harper

funnysantaWith the holiday season just 2 months away, let’s look at 8 tips to help prepare you for more customers and more sales. If you have any tips you’d like to add please feel free to leave a comment.

  1. Make your order cutoff deadlines clear. During the holiday season customers want to know that their order will arrive before Christmas, so make sure you clearly state your order date deadlines in your online store.
  2. Order more stock for popular items. You’ll generally sell more products over the holiday season so make sure you have sufficient stock on hand, especially for your popular products. Christmas is one time you can’t afford to delay shipping on orders due to low inventory.
  3. Get your top sellers on the home page. Make sure your top selling products stand out on your home page and use incentives such as “buy [popular product] and get [less popular/cheap product] free” to move the less popular items that you sell and to offer better value to shoppers.
  4. Try a holiday-themed store design. Get your online store into the holiday spirit by switching to a holiday-themed store design and/or adding a holiday element as part of your logo, such as Christmas lights or mistletoe.
  5. Make your newsletter signup box prominent. Keep the sales going after the holidays by putting a strong focus on your newsletter signup box and asking shoppers to sign up. Give them a great reason such as discount coupons or useful information and you’ll grow your email list quickly.
  6. Group products by recipient. For example, group products into categories such as “Boys 0-5″, “Boys 6-10″, “Boys 11-15″, etc to make it easy for shoppers to find gifts for their loved ones. Remember that a good percentage of online shoppers start out not knowing exactly what they want to buy so the easier you can make it for them, the more you’ll sell.
  7. Create a “Holiday Specials” category. Find about 20-30 products which you can sell at cost price and add them to a new category called “Holiday Specials”. You can then use Google AdWords to advertise these discounted prices and use the loss leaders to entice shoppers to buy other gifts from your online store.
  8. Keep customers in the loop. Customers love to track the status of their order online so make sure you assign UPS/USPS/FedEx tracking numbers to your orders from your store’s control panel. You’ll get fewer (if any) order inquiries and your customers will put their trust in you for shipping on time as promised.

[Video] What is Return on Investment?

Published on September 6th, 2009 by Mitchell Harper

Return on Investment (or ROI for short) is a tool you can use to measure the success of your marketing campaigns. As an online retailer, it’s critical you know which campaigns are performing so you don’t fall prey to the old saying “50% of advertising works and 50% doesn’t. I’m just not sure which half is which.”

In the video above I discuss return on investment. I’ll teach you what it is, why it matters and how – in combination with your sales cycle – you can track your ROI for every marketing campaign you run. This will lead to more profitable marketing campaigns for your business, whether it’s Google AdWords, email marketing, postcards or TV ads.

If you’re actively involved in tracking marketing campaigns then you may already understand the concepts presented in this video. If not, it’s a good grounding for basic marketing theory which you can put in to practice – and which we’ve used to runs successful marketing campaigns both online and off, with conversion rates of up to 27% and an ROI of over 1,200%.

This video is the first of many which we’ll be publishing on our new YouTube guru channel, BigCommerceDotCom. Check it out and make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss future videos.

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