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Ten Web Shop Prep Tips for the
Holidays
August 28, 2008
ecommerce-guide.com
As autumn
approaches, it's time for e-tailers to start planning
for the holiday rush. If you start now, you'll have the
time required to get your site in shape for maximizing
fourth-quarter profits.
To help,
here are 10 tips from Demandware's Vice President of Marketing, Jamus
Driscoll. Ten Holiday Prep Tips for Web Shops:
1.
Make sure your
customers can find you. Eighty percent of shopping trips start
with the search box, and that percentage increases
during the holidays. Look through your search logs from
last November forward to identify ways to improve site
search effectiveness. Typical fixes include:
o
Adding to
synonym/hypernym (for example, "musical instrument" is a
hypernym of "guitar" because musical instruments include
guitars) dictionaries;
o
Enhancing product
descriptions (adding relevant keywords);
o
Expanding product
assortment (consider adding product lines that customers
seem to want but you don't yet carry in time for the
holidays).
2.
Build out your
affiliate network. Under
current economic conditions, shoppers are going to be
very savvy when looking for the best deal online. Now is
the time to start building strong relationships with
those affiliates that are likely to drive significant
traffic and volume to your site during the holidays.
Consider setting up automated product feeds to key
shopping comparison sites like GoogleBase, Shopzilla,
NexTag and other sites that your customers frequent.
3.
Set your product
catalog. Pay particular
attention to catalog readiness for cross-selling and
up-selling opportunities, product related promotions and
product categorization for easy navigation. Make sure
products are easy to find by adding proper keywords for
search results. Also, make sure you have the capability
to cross-merchandise products in different categories -
during the holidays, you'll want to present a given
product in both its "home" category (e.g. men's shirts)
and also theme, event or occasion-based categories such
as "Gifts for Dad," "Pre-Thanksgiving Sale," "Hot Gift
Ideas," etc.
4.
Prepare holiday site
enhancements.
o
Add "wish list"
functionality. By helping customers create the list and
linking other people to that list, you not only convert
a "wish" to a completed sale, you reduce returns and
increase customer satisfaction.
o
Promote gift
certificates and gift cards. Promote gift certificates
on the homepage and other frequently visited landing
pages, and add the ability to redeem them to the
checkout process. Gift certificate purchases have grown
by leaps and bounds over the past 10
years.
o
Offer gift wrapping.
This service adds convenience and creates
differentiation from other retailers. It also helps your
customers save time during the busy holiday season,
which will ultimately build customer loyalty.
5.
Segment your
audience. The holidays are
the season for gifts - most shoppers are buying for
other people. For example if you're a jeweler,
anticipate that men will be buying for women. Change the
look and feel, products and promotions for the type of
audience that is going to be buying during the holidays.
6.
Bestsellers and gift
ideas. Highlight these
items on your homepage to provide additional gift ideas
for uncertain shoppers. Create detailed gift guides
based on the recipient, the price point and other
elements to lead customers to a purchase.
7.
Engage in A/B testing
now. Engage in A/B testing
of new site design concepts, features and functionality
to get some real-world data before settling on what
you'll ultimately go with during the holidays. For some
merchants, the back-to-school season might be an ideal
time for this type of testing.
8.
Get creative with
promotions. Don't just use
flat discounts to drive traffic - think about the
long-term relationship with the customer. Think about
loyalty-based promotions that will create repeat
customers and word-of-mouth marketing. Also create a
sense of urgency by making order-by dates and
time-sensitive offers part of your promotions strategy.
9.
Leverage social
merchandising. Beyond
adding a comments and review section on product pages,
consider these other social merchandising tactics:
o
Allowing customers to
create desired "outfits" or bundles of multiple
products, and saving/sending these to friends and
family.
o
Enabling/encouraging
customers to post favored products to their Facebook or
MySpace profiles, or to vertical networking sites like
StyleFeeder.
o
Making use of instant
messaging, mobile marketing/advertising and RSS
as channels for holiday marketing and promotional
campaigns.
10.
Update inventory on
product pages. Nothing
infuriates a customer more than to find out that the
product is out of stock after the completion of the
checkout process. Post inventory levels on every product
page to set expectations for customers and also create a
sense of urgency when levels are low. Make this a
year-round practice.
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/article.php/3768321 | | |
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The
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1. |
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visits and purchases. |
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2. |
Preview customer
details --
View details of the customer selected in the
customer list. |
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3. |
Customer
list --
View and sort all your customers in one place.
Easily edit their
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Quick access to customer
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View and manage detailed information about your
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Set
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Create a
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Create
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keep several shipping addresses for each
customer. | | |
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Planning for
Uncertainty
www.billpearsononline.com
... not a good time for excess
inventory
If I had to
characterize small store, independent retailing since
the events of September 11th, it would be that things
aren't great, but could be a whole lot worse. Yes, these
are broad generalities and there are numerous
exceptions. The West Coast seems less impacted
than the East. Stores that target younger
customers are better off than those that have more
mature customers. Men's is worse than women's and
children's is the least affected. Hawaii, Florida
and most other tourist destinations are really
struggling. Independents in airports and adjacent
to theme parks are getting totally hammered. And
then there's the New York metro area where Manhattan
retailers are really hurting, while many New Jersey,
Westchester County and Long Island independents are
doing quite well. Overall, things are pretty mixed
and nearly impossible to figure. It's one thing to
plan for unseasonable weather, an economic downturn or
even a lackluster fashion season. But planning for
the random events we are all now facing brings a whole
new set of variables to the notion of sales forecasting
and inventory management. From one who does this
for a living, I can confirm that it's no picnic.
For any retailer given to casual, on again-off again,
gut instinct, seat-of-the-pants inventory management, a
continuation of such behavior is near
suicidal.
First, we have been told
there is more to come. Whether this is inflated
rhetoric or gruesome reality, only time will tell.
Combined with this uncertainty is the unfortunate fact
that some customers are clearly in a state of perpetual
over-reaction, at the least or complete panic, in the
extreme. That said, if a customer (fellow citizen)
wants to hole-up in his or her basement, venturing out
only for work or to refill their mini-refrigerator,
that's their prerogative. While a sufficient
number of such cases could further mess-up our economy
to say nothing of our industry, caution and even fear
are private emotions and not subject to any amount of
regulation.
Another big variable we
should all be considering is what will happen come
clearance time. Yes I know, it's already that for
many among us, but I'm talking about those last few days
of December and most, if not all, of January. What
will happen to the millions of dollars in unsold
inventory accumulating at both retail and
wholesale? It obviously won't vanish; it can't be
set aside and saved. It's got to go somewhere and
rest assured it won't be at anything close to regular
price. Better goods manufactures that have never
sold into the deep off-price market have already or will
soon do so. Our industry isn't like gifts or books
or housewares where over-stocks can simply be pushed-out
to the next season. For the fashion industry, it's
now or never. Sell it fast or give it to
Goodwill. Independents accustomed to unloading
major quantities of sale merchandise in late December
and January may be in for a rude awakening. Once
an alert customer finds 50 linear feet of $1000 designer
suits for $249 at Men's Warehouse and his wife a
department chocked-full of $79 "better" dresses at
Forman's or Dressed-Up, how interested do you think they
and their friends will be in your 30% to 50% off sale
rack? Each year I'm increasingly amazed at the
vast quantities of sale goods that consumers are willing
to digest. This year I expect we'll find their
limit.
Click Here to continue
reading article
http://www.billpearsononline.com/?page_id=44 |
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If you have become an ARMS client
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In pinch,stores stir
merchandise mix
Best Buy gets musical,
Walgreen's gets fashion in stretching brand
profiles
By Sandra M.
Jones
August 5,
2008
www.baltimoresun.com
CHICAGO - Guitars
at Best
Buy. Frozen pizzas
at Menards. Yoga pants at Walgreen's.
As the
economy slows and the retail industry cuts back on
investment in new-store construction, the time is ripe
for dusting off a tried-and-true retail strategy: Sell
more products in the stores you have.
Sometimes
it works. For instance, Barnes & Noble
Inc. changed the
bookselling business by putting coffee shops in its
stores.
Other times, it is a strategy that sends
merchants far into the weeds. Midwestern shoppers may
remember when supermarket chain Jewel sold lumber. But
the temptation to stray from what a retailer does best
is hard to resist when sales need a
boost.
Over the past year, Eau Claire,
Wis.-based Menard Inc., the home-improvement chain, set
up grocery aisles in three out of every four of its 240
stores, so shoppers can buy milk, canned goods, boxed
dinners and frozen pizza alongside roofing materials and
insulation.
Drugstore chain Walgreen
Co. introduced a
clothing line, called Casual Gear, at most of its 6,000
stores in April.
And last week Best Buy Co., the
consumer electronics powerhouse, began selling musical
instruments and music lessons at more than 75 of its 965
stores. The in-store shops offer more than 1,000
guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and recording equipment.
Band instruments, including entry-level trumpets,
violins, clarinets, saxophones and flutes from Suzuki,
are available online.
"The question from the
consumer is, what do you accept from the brand and what
feels foreign," said Neil Stern, senior partner at
Chicago-based retail consulting firm McMillan Doolittle
LLP.
Home Depot
, for example, went too far
off base when it opened a handful of convenience stores
that sold candy bars, cigarettes, coffee and fuel in the
parking lots of its stores in Georgia and Tennessee. The
sixth and last store opened in June 2007 and there are
no plans to open any more, said Sheriee Bowman, a
spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based home improvement
store. Still, Home Depot struck gold when it ventured
into refrigerators and washers and dryers, and it has
been chipping away at industry leader Sears Holdings
Corp.'s market share.
Likewise, Starbucks
garnered a lot of attention for selling books and
compact discs in its coffeehouses in recent years. But
now the Seattle-based chain is in the middle of a
retrenchment, closing stores, laying off workers and
refocusing on its main business of selling
coffee.
Best Buy, for its part, views its foray
into music as a logical extension of its existing
business of selling music players, home theater
equipment and compact discs, said Justin Barber, a
spokesman for the Minneapolis-based
company.
"Consumers have looked to us as a
resource for music for quite a while," Barber
said.
Sandra M. Jones writes for the Chicago
Tribune
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-bz.retail05aug05,0,2561642.story | | |
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