Online Store New Year's Resolutions

This weekend everyone will be thinking about and possibly writing down things that they would like to do differently in the coming year.  These New Year's Resolutions often include a fitness goal, a social goal, an education goal, or experience goals.  These same goals for the coming year in your personal life can be applied to your business' website.  Below I have outlined a few New Year's Resolutions for your online store's website for this coming year.

• Fitness - Trim Down While Bulking Up.  This does not mean removing content from your website.  When you work out, it is best to have some fat on you in order to build muscle.  If you don't have any fat, then you have nothing to convert to muscle.  This is the same for your website.  Every website has some "fat" on it; it is just a matter or rearranging or re-purposing that fat to bulk up. Look through your website and find areas where pages or functions are not as efficient as they could be. Then take those areas and enhance them or move them to where they will be more useful.
• Content vs. Calls-To-Action. Content is important, but you should not have all of your content above your calls-to-action.  Make sure your calls-to-action are above the fold on your website; this will likely involve rearranging your content so that it it lower on your page.
• Images with Text. Do you have large images such as banner graphics that have text in them?  Change those images to be smaller background images, and allow the text to be plain text on top of those images.  This will cut down on your page load times, while improving the content for search engines on your pages.
• Too Much Information. Again, this does not mean removing content.  If you throw all of your website options, products, advertisements, et al. all your customers on your home page, it can be overwhelming.  Divide your content out into sections or even multiple pages with each section or page focusing on one area.  On your home page, customers can click on the area they would like to learn more about and get that additional information.
• Social - Let Customers Know You Appreciate Them. Customers purchase from your website because they like something about your website.  It may be that they like your products, or that they love your low prices, or even that they like your flexible and informative customer support and return options.  Whatever the reason may be, customers who purchase from you are letting you know that they like your business.  So show the love back; let your customers know that you appreciate their business.  This could be as simple as a thank you card included when you mail their order, or it could be an email.  Ask customers for feedback on both the products that they purchased, and your company as a whole.  See if there is anything that you could do to improve their experience.  Also, provide customers with a way to keep up with your website and learn about new products, specials, or changes that might interest them. Make sure that any newsletters that you send are regular and not spammy (if you say it is a monthly newsletter, don't send one every week), and that they are for the benefit of your customers.  After all, it is your customers that keep you in business :).
• Education - Continue Learning And Sharing. This is great for you as a merchant, the customer, and your search engine ranking. Continually add content to your website or update a blog with information that deals with your company, the products you sell, and the industry you are part of.  If you sell furniture, you can include information on how to maintain your furniture, or new interior design trends.  If you sell clothing, show pictures of people wearing your clothing, give style tips on accessories, research the best materials and maintenance and share your research with your customers.  If you sell books or music, share information about your best selling authors and musicians, as well as relevant news in your industry.  Keep the content on your website current and informative. If you make your website an information resource, customers coming to your website for information might just end up purchasing, and customers who have purchased from you will come back to see updates.  You can include some of this information in your monthly newsletters, your blog or twitter posts, your facebook wall, and one relevant pages of your website.
• Experience - Try Something New. Your website may be functioning great, so you may not even be considering trying something new, but this can be good for both improving your visibility on the web and increasing sales.  If you are not doing regular newsletters, start a sign up.  Services such as MailChimp have packages that are free to get you started. You may want to add mobile pages to your website.  If you are using the latest version of ShopSite Pro, you can add a mobile option to all of your store pages easily. Maybe you haven't been blogging or you have yet to get on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Google+.  You don't know how may more customers you can reach until you try to branch out from your norm. 

I am going to try all of these things on my website, http://LaurenHillsDesign.com this year.  I resolve to re-organize my pages so that the most beneficial information for my customers is the easiest to find.  I resolve to provide more ways to keep in contact with my business.  I resolve to provide regular information updates about the eCommerce industry on my website, both information that I have researched and write, and link to third party websites providing helpful eCommerce information. I resolve to send out a monthly newsletter with eCommerce tips, specials for website enhancements, and fun facts or online stores that I come across.  If you would like to sign up to receive these monthly newsletters, you can sign up at the following URL: http://laurenhillsdesign.com/newsletter-signup.html.

Good luck in the coming year, and have a happy New Year!

Push to Christmas - Emergency Preparedness

Cyber Monday is over, you have a little calm before the last-minute-Christmas-shopper storm. Now is the time to do your emergency preparedness. Getting ready for those frantic shoppers needing their orders on time and those customers who ordered and expected their order by the holidays is essential for making your business' holiday season finish smoothly. One of the best ways to do this is to let customers know approximately when they will receive their order. Do this on your home page, your product pages, in the cart, and on the email receipt.

• Home Page Delivery Notice - on your home page, or in a main area on your website, advertise when is the approximate last day to place an order in your store and safely receive it by Christmas.
• Product Page Delivery Notice - some products ship quicker than others.  If you drop ship products, have custom products or products that ship at a different time, you will want to let customers know.  Include some text near the add to cart button letting customers know approximately when to expect each individual product if they ordered it that day.  Or, for each individual product, list the last day that product can safely be ordered to arrive by Christmas.
• Shopping Cart Delivery Notice - this should be the most exact delivery notice because at this point you have the customer's shipping zip code.  Include on this screen the delivery date as exact as possible.  Make this notice clear so that customers can assess if their gifts will arrive when they want.
• Thank You Delivery Notice - include the approximately delivery date in the email receipt if possible.

Another thing you may want to offer this time of year is expedited delivery. This will put some of your last minute shoppers very excited.

Good luck preparing for the final push of the hectic holiday season!

Reward Your Tired and Weary Shoppers

Everybody knows about the sales on Black Friday.  If you've participated in the craziness, you know that stores open as early as 4 or 5 in the morning, which means you are up at least by 2. However this year the sales start even earlier.  Stores such as Walmart, Target and Kohl's are opening their doors at midnight. Stores are putting more of an emphasis on the Black Friday sales. Another interesting bit of information is that NRF's Holiday Survey found that people are planning on spending more on themselves this year. So how can you use this knowledge to your advantage? Reward the weary!

The equivalent for online retailers of Black Friday is Cyber Monday, yet, by this point shoppers have already spent an exhausting weekend at local retailers hunting for deals.  By the time Cyber Monday rolls around you have some pretty exhausted and sleep deprived shoppers.  They have not been able to get all the items that they wanted at local retailers, so they are turning to the internet to solve their gift giving problems.  Yes, they are likely still looking for some glimmer of those sale prices that they saw over the weekend, but, as NRF's survey forecasts, they are also looking for a little pick-me-up for themselves. So show your tired shoppers some love by offering them free gifts or bonuses.  They can purchase the gifts for their loved ones, then get a guilt-free bonus gift for themselves.  You'll want to make this incentive worth your while, so offer deals such as "Spend over $X and get a FREE X!" This will increase your total per sale and will raise your customer's spirits over the busy shopping weekend.

Post-Purchase Advertising

I have begun seeing messages on facebook and twitter from my friends such as "I just pre-ordered the new Amazon Kindle!" and "I just purchased this new phone case.  You can save $10 on a new phone case using promo code 'fonekase'." Allowing your customers to advertise your products on their facebook and twitter accounts easily is a great way for you to get new customers, and it's free advertising. Some stores will simply form a message for the customer stating what they purchased with an image of the product and a link back to your website while other stores will offer customers and their friends incentives, such as providing a promotion code or advertising an upcoming sale in the facebook post or tweet.

If you need help setting up a "share on facebook" and "share on twitter" option on your ShopSite thank you page, you can have me set it up for you.  More information about this option can be found at the following URL:
http://laurenhillsdesign.com/templates/post-purchase-share-on-facebook-twitter.html

Is Your Site Ready For Mobile Commerce?

Many top websites have optimized their website for mobile or have mobile pages.  So many sites have done this that smart phone users are beginning to expect that sites will have a mobile version. Pinching to enlarge and squinting at the content is no longer acceptable for many smart phone users.  So is your website ready?

ShopSite is planning to have a mobile capability built into their next release where users will be redirected to a mobile optimized version of your website.  So what do you need to do to prepare to use this upcoming feature?

• Logo. Start by creating a mobile sized version of your logo.  Many websites that you visit will have a header/logo area that takes up no more than 60-70 pixels of the top of the mobile screen.
• Navigation. No doubt you have many different ways for users to find what they are looking for on your website, but since space is limited on a phone, narrow your main categories down to about 4 main categories that will be listed on every page.  The first link should be a "home" link or a "categories" link so that customers can always return to your main list of store categories.  The other three links should be your top categories, or your most interesting categories such as "sale" or "new items." Decide what 4 links you would like at the top of all your mobile pages.
• Template Tags. If you are using built in templates within ShopSite, this is not an issue for you.  However, if you are using custom templates, you will need to add the new mobile tags to your custom page and custom more information page template so that the redirect code will be included on your pages.  Below are the two required template tags for mobile.
           [-- MOBILE_JAVASCRIPT --] - goes within the <head></head> tags.
           [-- SS_MOBILE_REDIRECT --] - goes right after the <body> tag.
• Footer. Your footer should be simple but informative.  Many merchants will include their company information links in their footer such as the "about us" page, the "shipping and returns information" page and "terms and conditions." If you have copyright information that you would like to include, you can include that in the footer as well. 
• Emails. Often, smart phone users have one or more of their email accounts tied to their phone, so when they receive an email, they can check that email without going to their computer.  Because of this, you will want to make sure that ALL of your emails to customers are mobile optimized.

I am excited to delve more into the capabilities of mobile as there become more and more mobile users and mobile optimized websites causing mobile to evolve. If you are planning to have a mobile optimized website, make sure you keep up on mobile trends.  This technology if rapidly expanding and changing.