Ecommerce Site Owners' Guide to Holiday Sales

If this is the first time you've thought seriously about holiday sales, you're already late to the game. Bricks-and-mortar stores, the traditional leaders of retail sales, put months of planning into their campaigns, all to capture just a few more customers and start the holiday sales season just a few days earlier.

This effort takes place online as well: Amazon.com, Buy.com and all the other major dot coms have extensive holiday promotions, run large marketing campagins, and have made serious inroads to the gift buying market.

The good news is that, even if you're off to a late start, there's still plenty you can do to cash in on the biggest sales season of the year!

Recently, several sites have reported that computer savvy consumers may conduct as much as 50% or more of their holiday shopping online. While this statistic is, perhaps, a bit higher than that for the entire U.S. consumer market, these numbers more than illustrate the simple point that people are going online to shop for gifts. And why not? With Internet access reaching 3 out of 4 homes in the U.S., and hundreds of millions of consumers world-wide, buying gifts online really is a logical decision. After all, shops mean driving, parking, long queues, and all sorts of hassles that can easily be avoided online.

With free shipping offers, money-back guarantees, and, often, lower prices than physical stores, there's rarely a downside to shopping online, especially when it comes to products that don't have variable sizes, and no features that you want to check out physically, first-hand, before you buy. For DVDs, music, electronics, name brand toys and any other straight-forward product or service, the Internet is the simplest solution to the hectic task of buying gifts.

So, how can you sell more online? There are a number of important tips and tricks that can win you a bigger piece of the holiday shopping action. The first factors to consider in any successful holiday promotion are theme, presentation and mood. Ultimately, all your sales, marketing, discount and other offers are simply part of an overall effort to get visitors into the gift-buying mood. This is especially important early in the holiday season; while many consumers start to think about gifts in late October, they may not consider making these purchases for months. By putting subtle cues in place, you can actually speed up the sales cycle by showing contemplators that now is the time for them to start buying. The better your site communicates this idea, the better are the odds that browsers will decide to buy at your store now.

Step 1. Add the "Holiday Spirit" to your Site

Adding holiday theme changes is a touchy subject that must be approached with careful planning. Incorporate too many holiday elements, and you risk appearing blatant and tacky; add too few and your customers may miss the message entirely. Finding a balance usually means adding simple, conservative images, color changes, a themed logo and perhaps new icon sets -- but nothing that gets too flashy or over the top. As with all site revisions, be certain to run some user tests before you make a full launch, just to be certain you aren't negatively impacting your user flow, or generating any usability issues. You don't want to miss out on 70% of your sales because the new version of Internet Explorer has a conflict with your cute little snowflake DHTML effect.

At this stage, you also want to start to incorporate the right holiday message, to let your visitors know that you are the best source of the gifts they need to buy. While your returning customers are often your most loyal supporters, they may not consider your store as a place at which they want to purchase products for others, nor may new visitors who come looking for something for themselves. This is where your gift-shopping message comes into play: by adding some of the elements we'll discuss later in this article, you can successfully shift the consumer mindset from, "I'm here to buy for me," to, "I'm here for me, but I can also buy something for someone else…" Your industry and niche is almost irrelevant at this point -- even technical, super-geeky products are something that someone else may want as a gift.

Consider the case of just one online store: in late October, Bath and Body Works launched its new holiday layout. As a retailer, choosing when to step into the holiday theme can be quite a challenge, especially if you make the jump before retail stores kick off their own campaigns. However, in the gift and personal beauty products arena, competition is always fierce. Making the most of the holiday season is vital to the bottom line.

The site revamp that Bath and Body created captures the holiday marketing theme with a direct, warm, tasteful site. Rather than tossing in several vibrant colors, the site focuses on red, silver, and a hint of green, creating a visually soothing look. Holiday promotions take the form of ornaments and boxes which both illustrate product offerings and communicate that the store is open for holiday shopping. Simple yet effective, the entire approach can be summed up using the site's own marketing slogan: Get Ready for the Perfect Christmas. That's exactly what they're attempting to get customers thinking about.

Step 2. A Tool to Answer the Hardest Question: What Should I get Him...?

As we start buying gifts and checking people off our lists, there's always someone who's just impossible to shop for. Maybe it's a cousin who likes video games, or a friend who just has to have the latest golf gadget, but if you aren't a video game player and don't enjoy golf, chances are that you won't know what's good and what isn't. The same is true for most holiday shoppers: they know they need something for a particular person -- they may even know what category, or what type of item they want to get -- but they have no idea about the gift's specifics. By putting together a simple holiday gift guide, and a gift search/browse tool, you can help direct people to the product that fits the bill. The more robust your system, the more likely the customer is to find a good match, and trust your site's recommendation.

Consider adding a section to your site that allows customers to enter personal details such as age, gender, experience or skill -- any characteristics that pertain to your specific niche. Not only can this help potential customers find exactly what they need for a particular individual, but it can often inspire them to find something else for another person on that all-important gift list. Because this tool is all about helping consumers, make sure it's simple to use, and visible on your homepage, search engine landing pages, and any other major points of entry. After all, you want as many people to use the system as you can.

Discovery.com offers an enormous variety of products, from educational toys and gadgets, to DVD and VHS versions of their television shows. Of course, too much variety can cause problems when it comes to getting customers actually to buy something. One of the ways Discovery.com gets around this is with a robust gift finder that really helps shoppers get a little more direction.

The first time visitors access this feature, they're shown six options: Best Sellers, Customer Favorites, Discovery Exclusives, Just Aired, New Products, Stocking Stuffers and Under $25, but it doesn't stop there. Clicking on any of these main categories shows a list of products, along with an additional list of other gift recommendations; gifts for him, gifts for her, gifts for children, and gifts by product type exist within all of those sub-levels. The system is inherently simple, but it hits on the holiday theme, works to direct visitors by interest and price point, and easily sorts through what would otherwise seem to be a daunting range of product options.

Step 3. Facing the Challenge: "When Does it Get Here?"

When free shipping first appeared on the Web, people treated it as a rare event and a major discount. At that point, consumers had become so accustomed to paying shipping costs that these charges were considered standard. Of course, after a few big stores introduced the idea, it became much more widely accepted; now, some users won't make a purchase if shipping charges are involved. This, of course, is a silly notion: everyone knows shipping isn't free, it's simply a matter of whether the vendor charges you the full cost up-front, includes it as part of a bundled price, or they absorb part of the cost via reduced margins, and charge you the rest. In any case, customers do pay for shipping; they just aren't seeing that particular line item on the bill.

Still, for most consumers, the idea of getting an item without that extra little fee at the end really stands out: it's a value proposition that people simply love. We see this same appeal applied tax and other related handling fee discounts, although people tend to understand those costs a bit better.

Free shipping has now become so popular that there are hardly any retail stores that don't offer it. If you're not offering free shipping yet, consider this as a great time to test the trend. If you do offer it to your users, promote it! Don't just put up a little link: scream that you don't charge for shipping! One great way to do this is to add a banner or graphic to your homepage, announcing the offer as if it's new and exciting. Make it a limited-time event, and make sure you tell consumers that they get free shipping on their gifts. Put them in their holiday buying mood: "Free shipping on all gift purchases through Christmas week only!"

It's important to realize that shipping is your major hurdle -- in fact, it's the major hurdle faced by all Web retailers. No matter how cheap your products are, or how good your service is, customers don't receive their purchases on the same day, and they will need to pay to have them shipped (unless of course you have a local store). At holiday time, this delay poses an even bigger risk: late arrivals. Almost everyone buys a few gifts at the last minute, but in the online world, the last minute might mean two weeks or more after the holiday, once you factor in packaging, shipping and delivery times.

Oddly enough, promoting your own "handicap" can actually solve the problem. Rather than charging customers full rates for faster shipping options, discount them. During the checkout process modify your site to show the original, full amount with a strike-through, and the special amount in bold. Despite the fact that two-day air may cost twenty bucks, it's still a "discount" and everyone loves a discount.

It's also a good idea to take on shipping directly by displaying a list of "order-by" dates throughout your Website (including the homepage). Use a simple chart to show customers the date by which they must place their orders to have the delivery made by Christmas. Factor in packaging time, delivery across the country (don't assume customers live five miles away), and any foreseeable delays. If a customer orders a gift and it doesn't arrive by December 24, there's a 99.9% chance they will return the purchase, so save yourself the headache: give them a firm cut-off date.

Long before Christmas, and even the U.S. Thanksgiving holidays, Hershey's Gifts had ship-by reminders in place not for the winter, but for Hallowe'en. On nearly every product page, on the homepage, and on search pages, Hershey's provides a clear, prominent banner that displays the purchase deadline for guaranteed delivery. As the holiday season progresses, so does the banner. While the initial message is by no means detailed, the overwhelming visibility is what makes it so effective. A linked page shows interested users all the information they could hope to see: shipping estimates are color-coded by US geographic location and shipping method. The impact is clear. Every visitor knows when they have to order by, and that makes visitors all the more eager to buy.