Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Your site will be flooded with traffic this holiday season. How can you harness that traffic to create year long business? Consider offering a good discount incentive for customers to come back and shop in January. You can automatically email them a coupon after each order, or send one along with the package. Don’t forget to email and remind customers to come back and use their discounts.

Loosen Up & Emphasize Your Return Policy: While a 30 day return policy is commonplace for the rest of the year, it may scare off early shoppers during the holidays. Make it clear to your visitors that you will accept returns and exchanges on all Christmas gift purchases. Be sure to let visitors know early and often about your policy, such as on product pages and the shopping cart.

Review Past Failures & Successes: Try this as you plan your busy holiday season. Take a look at you and your competitor’s website’s through the lens of the Wayback machine. What worked and didn’t work last year? What can you improve upon?

Communicate with Fulfillment & Customer Service: Don’t surprise your customer service and fulfillment staff with a unplanned for 24 hour blowout sale. (I’m talking from experience ). Taking 10,000 orders in a day is great, but if your warehouse can only ship 1,000, you’re in trouble. Work with your operations team in order to smooth out the volume spikes. One company I work for emails promotional offers to their customers by region, over a 2 week time period. This ensures that not everyone gets the offer at once, resulting in too many orders to fulfill in too short of time.

Use a Website Monitoring Service: Odds are, your website will go down at least once during the busy holiday season. If you’re not big enough to have a 24 hour IT department monitoring your server, signup for a website monitoring service such as Alertsite, who will email or text message you if your site goes down.

Put All New Web Development on Hold: December is not the time to be re-coding your shopping cart. Send your developer on a much needed vacation. Well, not really, but do put a temporary hiatus on all major web development projects. The 4th quarter is the time to optimize, not innovate.

Post Shipping Cut-off Dates Prominently: This is quite possibly the most important information to communicate to customers during the holidays. Check with your shipping carriers to determine what the cutoff days are for the various methods of shipping. As you get closer to Christmas, consider offering discounted priority shipping services to extend your selling period.

Do a Security Once-Over: Hackers don’t take time off for the holidays, in fact they probably work even harder. For this reason, have a professional audit your website for security flaws. Services like McAfee’s Scan Alert do a good job at detecting most eCommerce vulnerabilities.

Monitor those 404 and 500 Errors: Talk with your webmaster and ask him to setup a script that notifies him every time a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error) occurs on your site. You might be surprised how often errors occur. When we set this up for one of my clients, they received over 1,000 errors in one day. These errors can be costly, especially at Christmas time.

Allow Gift Receipts: Gift givers hate revealing how much they spent on a gift. Make sure you allow customers to click a Gift receipt option that will hide the prices on the packing list from the recipient.

Allow Gift Messages: Let your customers add a personal message to their gift. For simplicity, you can have the message appear on the packing list which will already be included in the box.

Holiday Graphical Themes: Show some holiday spirit and redesign some of the artwork on your site with a holiday theme. Hopefully, this will get visitors in a buying mood.

Get Creative with your Creative: Every email blast you send doesn’t have to offer a discount or promotion. Consider sending out a gift guide or a Top 10 gift lists.

Promote your Wish List Feature: Start promoting your wish list feature, encouraging customers to share these wish list’s with family and friends.

Increase Server Capacity: Talk with your web host about how you can increase your server performance during the holiday rush. You don’t want to end up like Walmart or Amazon on  cyber Monday. Here’s a sad, but funny example of Macy’s servers getting overloaded.

Checkup on your Domain, Web hosting, SSL and Merchant Accounts: Letting your domain name expire mid-December will create a Christmas you’ll never forget. It’s not a bad idea to double check that your web hosting, SSL certificates, domains, and merchant account to ensure everything is all in order.

Audit Your Product Catalog: Have a detail oriented person visit each of your product pages to ensure accuracy. Check for typos, broken images, and bad hyperlinks. Small problems turn into big problems in the chaos of a busy Christmas season.

Seasonal SEO and PPC Landing Pages: Don’t forget to optimize your SEO and PPC campaigns for seasonal keywords. Visitors searching habits change around the holidays, so your marketing strategy should as well. Also, don’t fall into the trap of bidding wars, or allowing your ads to fall too low on the page.

Offer Online Gift Certificates: If your site doesn’t offer online gift certificates, and your visitors don’t find that perfect gift, they will just leave. Gift certificates make great last minute gifts. In addition, they’re a great way to drive sales at the beginning of next year.

Suggest Gifts by Person: Product category based navigation does little to help a frustrated gift giver find an idea for that hard to shop for person on their list. To help generate gift ideas, organize gifts intended for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, grandparents, etc.

Suggest Gifts by Price: In addition, organize gifts for budget conscience customers by price range. For example, highlight gifts under $10, 25, 50, 100 or whatever price points are appropriate for your business. Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. These can be a great way to increase your average order value.

Bundle Products: Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle. You can add value to your customer’s experience by simplifying the gift buying process through product bundling.

Offer Gift Wrapping: Many don’t like the idea of sending gifts to friends or family wrapped in nothing but bubble wrap or Styrofoam popcorn. If you can, offer gift wrapping services to your online customers. Be sure to charge enough to cover the labor and material costs for this additional service.

Emphasize Urgency: Let your customers know it’s not safe to wait until the last minute. To prevent shipping issues or product stock outs, encourage your customers to shop early.

Mystery Shop your Site: Ask a friend to mystery shop your site or hire a professional service. Mystery shopping should include ordering, contacting customer service, and returning the product back to you. You might be surprised to learn about a few problems.

Need an outside perspective on how you can maximize your site’s holiday sales? Here’s one final self promotional tip Checkout Palmer Web Marketing’s 3 Things or MySitePlan website review services.

 Below I’ve gathered some Cyber Monday marketing ideas for eCommerce sites.

1. Bounce Back Discounts: Capitalize off the huge amount of traffic you’ll be receiving by offering an incentive for the next purchase. While Cyber Monday sales are great, you really want consistent customers who will order all year long, even when there are no special offers. Try sending out a follow up email with a gift certificate or coupon code to everyone who makes a purchase.
2. Make It Viral: Take to the opportunity to capitalize on this huge traffic surge to encourage customer viral marketing. On your emails and landing pages for whatever promotion you run, include a link to a tell a friend form where shoppers can email your special to friends and family.
3. Clearance Loss leaders: A classic strategy, but I’ve found it works well online. Most of the time, customers will buy additional full-price merchandise, especially when they realize they have to pay shipping anyway. 
4. Free Gift at Threshold above Average Order: Give away some sort of gift item once customers reach a certain threshold. In order to determine the threshold, take a look at your average order on last year’s Cyber Monday and increase it bit. However, make sure the gift warrants spending that much.
5. Offer Deal on CyberMonday.com: If you doing something really noteworthy, you may want to highlight it on CyberMonday.com, a deal site run by Shop.org. Many prominent brands feature promotion there all year round, not just Cyber Monday.
6. Random “Blue Light” Specials: Randomly highlight items throughout the day on your site. Better yet, highlight different items everyday through the holiday season to keep people coming back.
7. Send 2 Reminder Emails For whatever promotion you run, make sure you keep your company top of mind after the Thanksgiving holiday. There will be a ton of marketing emails floating around, so you may want to send an initial email right before or after Thanksgiving. Then follow up with another right as the sale begins.
8. Give Store Credit, Not Discounts: Don’t give away the farm by offering outrageous discounts on your products if you don’t have to. Consider offering store credit in the form an online gift certificate that can be used towards a future purchase. For example, rather than offering a $25 discount, offer a $50 store credit. Incentives like these tend to cost less, and they may actually be more attractive to your repeat buyers.
9. Spread it Out: 1 day sales are great for everyone, except your fulfillment staff. In order to prevent hysteria for your warehouse and customer service staff, run the sale over a few days rather than 1 day only. This also will allow time for customer viral marketing to kick in.
10. Create Product Bundles: The value of a product bundle can be perceived as greater than the sum of its part because you are conveniently creating a one stop gift.

For more ideas, you might considering using the Wayback machine to view your competitor’s site last year at the time. I hope some of these ideas have been useful for you. Happy holiday selling!

In order to force myself to blog more often and in bite-sized portions, I’ve launched a new blog at DailyEcommerceTips.com. If you’d like to get the daily tip, you can subscribe via Email, RSS, Twitter, or Facebook. I will however, continue to update this blog as often as possible with more in depth content… if I can ever finish a post!

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13 Link Acquisition Tips

Creating link-worthy content will only get you so far. Eventually you have to go on the offense. Below are some ideas for reaching out and acquiring links for your e-store.

#8 - Approach bloggers for reviews: Bloggers love to be recognized as an authority in their niche, and they’re always looking for new content to write about. For this reason, I’ve found that approaching bloggers with an offer of free product in exchange for a review is the absolute easiest way to generate links to an e-commerce site. Here’s the key, don’t shoot off a generic email asking for a link with anchor text “blah blah blah” in exchange for a review. This just screams SPAM. Instead, approach bloggers with sites that actually drive traffic and ask for a review without mentioning anything about links. Once they agree, you can drop a hint for a link to a specific page or with certain anchor text.

#9 - Supplier’s “Find a Store” pages: Take a moment and visit your product supplier’s websites. Odds are they have a “Find a Store” page. Are you listed there? If not, kindly “suggest” they fix that before you pay your next invoice.

#10 - Technology Provider’s Testimonial Pages: How many technology providers does your site use? Which ecommerce platform do you run? What about analytics or live chat? Contact your vendors and offer to write an testimonial in exchange for a link on their testimonial page.

#11 - Press Releases: Press releases can still work if used properly. While the links generated from sites like PRWeb aren’t as valuable as they used to be, the buzz created from a genuinely news-worthy release can create it’s own gravity of incoming links from other valuable sources.

#12 - Badges & Award Widgets: People love to be recognized. At C28, we created exclusive badges for our Street Team, and allowed members to embed their widget on their own sites. Each badge contains a small graphic recognizing their contribution to the community and strategic backlink to a key page. If you don’t have an online community, you can still make widgets work. Consider creating ones for your top product reviewers or VIP customers.

#13 - Blog Comments: I can feel you cringe when you read this. If you own a wordpress blog like me, you’re probably barraged with more SPAM comments than legit ones. However,  I’m not suggesting you use automated commenting software that produces crap links. I’m referring to genuine, well written comments linking to relevant content. Pick the top 3 blogs that are relevant in your industry, and begin commenting without backlinks. Overtime, you’ll gain trust from the blogger and his readers. Eventually, a well placed and relevant link back your site will be well received. The frequent interaction will also keep your brand top of mind for the blogger, and you just mind generate a do-follow link in a post someday.

#14 - Guest-Posting: Most people think of guest posting as a way to promote a blog. But why wouldn’t it work also for e-commerce? It goes without saying you can’t write a post directly promoting your products and expect a legit blogger to post it. Instead approach the task from this angle: what topic can I write about for an audience that would also buy my product? If you don’t know any bloggers accepting guest posts, try a service such as MyBlogGuest.

#15 - Sponsor NPO’s: Of course the motivation for sponsoring a non-profit organization shouldn’t be link acquisition. But the odds are, your organization has already sponsored many non-profits in the past who have highly authoritative websites. If so, drop them an email and ask if they’d consider linking back to you.

#16 - Industry Directories: One-size-fits-all directories once provided value, but those days mostly gone. However, industry specific directories still provide actual traffic and a relevant backlinks. If you’re not aware of any industry directories, run a Google search for “[your industry] directory” and see what comes up. If the site has authority, it’s probably worth the price to get listed.

#17 - On-Site Affiliate Program: Most affiliate networks, such as Commission Junction or Share-a-Sale, use redirect links that do little to help your link building. If you run a successful affiliate program with loyal affiliates, consider switching to on-site software that uses SEO friendly url’s. It’s likely that your affiliate’s have high PR sites, so this can provide a quick pickup of high quality links.

#18 - Competitive Analysis: Creativity in link building is sometimes overrated. After all, the moment you acquire that elusive, little known link, your competitors will know. For this reason, using a tool like Open Site Explorer, do a competitive analysis of your competitor’s link profile. Evaluate which links are influencing their ranking most, and go after them with a vengeance.

#19 - Niche Forums: Where do your prospective customers hangout online? Get involved wherever they do. Many forums allow do-follow links once you’ve met the minimum number of valuable contributions.

#20 - Just ask: If there’s one thing I learned from 5 years in person-to-person sales it’s this: If you want the sale, you have to ask for it. People don’t just volunteer to help you out. What relationships do you have that might result in a link? Just ask for it! If you’ve given your customers great service, they’re actually itching to pay you back somehow. There’s a ton of places to ask for a link. You can ask for links on your thank you/receipt page, your follow-up product review email, your product page, or the footer of your site. I’m constantly amazed when people email me and ask if they have permission to link to one of my sites. Heck yes you do, thank you very much!

5 Ideas for Crafting Internal Links

No discussion about link building would be complete without mentioning internal methods, which are often the lowest hanging fruit.

#21 - Share the Love: Using Google Webmaster Central, figure out what pages Google considers the most important in terms of inbound links. (under “Your site on the web > Links to your site”). Compare that to the pages you consider the most important. Odds are, they are very different. That’s why it’s crucial to pass the link love from Google’s important pages on to the pages that bring you conversions.

#22 - Redirect Links to OOS Products: How many out-of-stock products are in your catalog? Are those now defunct product pages doing you any good? By redirecting old product pages to appropriate new ones, you not only recycle the link juice, but also increase the likelihood of a conversion.

#23 - Contextual Links within Product Descriptions: Product descriptions are prime real-estate for internal linking magic. Here’s the strategy I use. On your top products, have a good copy-writer drop a well-placed link somewhere into the body of the description pointing back to an important and relevant category page or landing page. (I’d refrain from linking product pages directly to other product pages. It’s simply too hard to maintain static links when products go in and out of stock.) With this tactic, you have 100% control of the anchor text and a virtual unlimited number of product pages to work with.

#24 - Merchandise Top Sellers First: This is just basic merchandising 101. The default sorting option for your product listings pages should always show top sellers first. In addition to the obvious conversion benefits, this will pass the optimal amount of PageRank to the product pages that deserve it most.

#25 - Use Consistent Category and Product Page URLs: Depending on your e-commerce platform, your category and product page links may change at times when the need to pass a new query parameter arises. Be sure your developers know the importance of mainting consistent, SEO friendly url’s. There’s nothing worse than link building to several permutations of URL’s that are constantly changing.

You’ll notice that if you eliminate the SEO motive on these ideas, there’s still tremendous value. And that’s how it should be, value drives links, which drives rankings, which drives traffic, which drives conversions. What other tips can you add to this list? What’s working or not working for you?

Far too many online businesses worship at the alter of the homepage. While certainly important, homepages today carry far less importance than in years past. When I review the analytics on most of the sites I work with, the vast majority of visitors never see the homepage. (When you have a moment, take a look at not only how many of your visitors never see the homepage, but also what percentage of overall pageviews your homepage represents, you’ll probably be shocked at how low it is.) This is due to a myriad of reasons, one of which is that people simply search for specific content, and Google does a pretty decent job of landing you on the specific page you’re looking for. There’s just no reason to pass through an overly generic destination like a homepage.

I believe one of the biggest sins in web design is promoting mission-critical products and promotions only on the homepage. I typically see sites where an email signup or free shipping promotion is highlighted only on the homepage. This is a tragedy, because there’s very little leverage in the homepage, compared with other, more frequently viewed pages. The time you spend redesigning and testing is much better spent on your product, category, or shopping cart pages.

#2 – Most of your Web Marketing is a Waste

In reality, most web marketing rarely pays off in the long run. Once you account for the cost of goods, the direct cost of marketing, and the cost of internal resources, you might be shocked to realize how little you profit. The point here is not to suspend your marketing, but rather to track long term results and impact.

This is a lesson we learned at C28 the hard way. For years we believed that the PPC ads for our jewelry line were performing well. The ROI was far superior to the ads that promoted our clothing category. But once we analyzed the lifetime customer value of each category, we realized that the jewelry shoppers rarely ever made subsequent purchases. Over a period of 1 to 2 years, the ads with the lower short-term ROI produced the best long term results. Don’t be overly short-sighted when tracking your marketing ROI. Shoot for acceptable short-term ROI, and exceptional long-term ROI. Also, don’t forget to count the cost of goods and the cost of internal resources in your ROI calculations.

#3 – Google Analytics is Lying

Open another browser tab, go to the e-commerce section of your analytics. What percentage of  sales come from Google? What about Facebook or your email marketing? If you’re like most online retailers,  your analytics will tell you that well over 50% of your revenue comes from the big 3: search engines, email, and facebook. But do they really?

When was the last time you discovered a new business from an email? I’ll wager to bet not recently. When did  you last use Google to search for a brand you already know and love? Probably today. The point is that the big 3 frequently get credit for sales they don’t deserve because Google analytics gives credit the source of the last click. This means that revenue generated from a person who clicked on your banner ad, visited your site, and later return via a Google search is ultimately attributed to Google.

Marketing attribution is a complication subject. While the big 3 certainly deserve credit for assisting with conversions, they certainly should not always get credit for creating demand in the first place. Google analytics is a good first step, but ultimately you need to track all the variables involved with generating a conversion. When you begin looking all of your customers’ behavior prior to a purchase, you’ll be surprised at how your marketing campaigns work together. You’ll see that a banner ad generated demand, an email created a follow up visit, and a remarketing ad finally closed the sale. When you calculate ROI, it’s important to understand that the last step doesn’t deserve all the credit.

#4 – No one cares about your design

Now let me qualify this. I’m not justifying creating intentially ugly designs, or enganging in lazy web design. I’m arguing that all the ooo-ing and awe-ing your team is doing about fonts, colors, slideshows, etc is probably overkill.

People arrive at your website with a goal. It’s not like visiting an art gallery, where people stroll and savor the beauty of the art and the skill of the artist. People will judge your site on how easily they can complete their objective, not on how your design stimulated their senses.

Can you add anything else to this list? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.

1) Too much imagination is required

All too many product pages require their customer’s to have a good imagination. For example, product images convey the product alone with a white background. Not exactly awe-inspiring. Online shopping can be devoid of context when product images aren’t show in use. Lifestyle and contextual images help create mental ownership by giving specific examples of use.

Yes, it’s a lot of work to get this type of photography on your site. But as I recently shared my experience C28′s lifestyle images, it can be earth-shatterly effective.

Don’t require your customer to have a good imagination. Paint a picture for them. How will it look in context, in their hands, in use?

2) Too much feature-talk

Here’s where our friend the curse of knowledge sneaks up again. The more you know about your products, the harder it will be to describe them to a newbie. If your descriptions are written from the perspective of an expert user, you’re probably throwing around terms that don’t make sense to the novice.

A great many products have failed due to feature-speak. Who even remembers Creative’s 5GB mp3 player? But we do remember the first Apple Ipod. While Creative beat Apple to the market, Apple pushed the benefit (“1,000 songs in your pocket”) vs. the feature (“5GB mp3 player”). It’s obvious which approach won out.

Remember that features are meaningless unless the benefit is understood. Don’t assume customers understand the benefits of your product’s features.

3) Lack of a Backstory

Every product has a story, but it’s rarely told. Why was the product made? Was it inspired by a tragedy or light bulb moment in the inventor’s life? Think of the last time you told someone about a product you’re passionate about. There’s a good chance you started with the backstory.

It’s the same reason we love hearing about how stars became famous. It’s the journey that makes them interesting and worth repeating. It gives the product meaning and purpose, and makes you feel like you’re buying more than just an “it”, you’re entering into the story.

If you don’t know the product’s story, talk to those who developed it. Convey any information you can to the customer to help create a meaningful back-story.

4) Focus on Logical vs. Emotional Selling Points

Too often we expect our buyers to be purely logical. One example is product reviews. A typical product review is written in a rather objective way, with the reviewer pointing out specific features they liked/disliked. But what if you asked your customers for stories instead? Instead a “review this item” why not “tell us a story of how you enjoyed this item”.  So a review on a fishing reel changes from “it’s a good, solid reel with a smooth drag” to “I spent a whole day at the Lake and caught 5 bigmouths with it.”

Though we all like to think we’re logical buyers, the truth is it’s usually an emotional appeal that hooks us.

Sometimes the easiest fixes are the low tech ones. The suggestions above won’t require hours of a programming, just some serious thought about your products. Let me know what you think. What techniques have you used on your product pages?

1. Stop relying on discounts: Pretend that for the next year your business had to survive selling only full price products or services. Would you survive? What does your answer say about the health of your brand? Kevin Hillstrom reminds us that “discounts and promotions are taxes placed on brands for being unremarkable”. What truly sets your business apart? Why would a customer choose you over a competitor? If you’ve been overly reliant on deals during last year’s economic debacle, ask yourself when enough is enough. The sooner you start weaning customers off discounts, the sooner you’ll begin cultivating healthy, long-term business.
2. Stop relying on “best practices”: Internet business is maturing. It’s not good enough anymore to simply follow the wisdom of the crowd. We all know we need fast loading pages and easy to use shopping carts.  Now is the time to start testing bigger and bolder ideas. It’s ok to imitate for so long, but you can’t always play follow the leader. This year, be the one who makes best practices instead of the one who follows them.
3. Stop relying on “more”: When sales are slumping, the most appealing solution is often “do more”. That means more emails, more promotions, more ads, whatever. But more is a slippery slope, and only digs you into a hole for next year. What if your marketing budget was cut in half this year? How would you adjust? Start obsessing about doing better, not just more.
4. Stop drinking the feedback Kool-aid: Many businesses think they’re getting good feedback from their customers. The problem is the people who are most likely to give feedback (your best customers) are the ones you need it from the least. Start thinking about how to get the painful, yet necessary feedback from ex-customers or non-customers. Why have they not considered you or stopped shopping altogether? This year, do everything it takes to reach the people you really need feedback from.
5. Stop the analytics overload: Dozens of advanced web analytics tools have sprung up over the last few years. Yet we seem to be drowning in data and thirsting for meaning at the same time. How can we make sense of this paralyzing analytics overload?  For many etailers, it really all boils down to a few metrics worth tracking: visits, conversion rate, and average order size. Start with these 3 fundamental KPIs and move backwards, asking yourself what the root problems are preventing these metrics from improving. Take your top ideas and start testing now.

Have you made any new years anti-resolutions for your online business? Share them below.

1. Shock your first time customers by calling them within a day of their order. Ask them for feedback and thank them for their support.
2. Post online profiles of everyone at the company, but ditch the boring executive bios. Instead post profiles from the rank and file, the people who actually interact with your customers on a daily basis. The profiles will remind your customers they buy from people, not an “organization”
3. Take one day a month and answer the phones yourself. Tell customers who you are and get their feedback first hand. Customer’s love to opine when they know they’re talking to a decision maker. (I guarantee you will walk away with loads of new ideas from this tip).
4. Include a manager’s business card along with every order, along with a note asking for feedback.
5. You know those feedback boxes on your website? Don’t just read them, respond to every single customer who leaves a suggestion. They took the time to leave their 2-cents, don’t they deserve a response? (from my personal experience, customers are utterly shocked when you respond to suggestions. Kinda sad, isn’t it?)
6. Leave smiley face and “thank you” penciled on your customer’s receipt. Restaurant servers do it. It reminds them a real human touched their order.
7. Give to a worthy cause. Make sure you communicate specifically the people who benefit from your donations, so customers feel the connection.
8. Include a picture of each customer service representative in their email signatures. Every time they engage a customer via email, they’ll be reminded a real, caring human being is on the other end.
9. Actually listen and respond to your customers via Facebook and Twitter. It’s shocking how many large brands still just push out updates and never bother to respond to comments or tweets.
10. Start blogging. Scratch the corporate-speak, and find an authentic trust agent from within the company customers will relate to. Zappos is the master of creating a window into company culture with their frequent video blog updates.
11. Publicly recognize your top customers, product reviewers, etc. Link to their profiles on your site. Give them e-badges that signify their loyalty, such how long they’ve been supporting you, etc.
12. Actively call your long-time customers before they call you. Not to sell them something, but rather to get feedback on a recent purchase or service call.
13. Assign a personal customer service rep to each customer. When a customer orders, send them an email letting them know who their personal customer service rep is. Assign the same customer service rep to the same customer each time they order and, voila, you’ve created a relationship.

Have you ever been pleasantly shocked by a company “getting personal” with you? Share your experience below.

On the contrary, I would argue we can learn much from the offline world. After all, with hundreds of years of experience, traditional retailers are in many ways much more polished than their online counterparts. Here’s 7 pointers we can take from the brick and mortar world.

1. Merchandising Matters: Countless hours of research have been performed on product merchandising. Grocery stores make a killing off selling prime locations on their shelves. I believe we are just starting to learn how to effectively merchandise online. How much thought have you given to how your products are ordered on your category pages? What about the way you order your categories in your nav? It kills me every time I see products or categories ordered alphabetically. Should accessories really be listed first if you’re known for your jeans? Probably not.
2. Packaging Matters: Few retailers consider packaging when selling products online. There’s a reason manufacturers spend millions on package design and testing, because it works. It’s a shame to not carry those elements online. Far from your typical product page, every product on the HoMedics website features a flash presentation, along with several tabs, one of which shows the product packaging. Too many product pages suffer from extreme boringness, offering a lifeless, overly-templated presentation of products. Showing packaging serves gift givers especially well, since they care about what the box looks like when the gift is opened.
3. Shopping is Social: Shopping mall empires are built upon the simple fact that shopping is a social activity. While our web is becoming increasingly social, online shopping seemingly lags behind. While services such as ShopTogether go so far as to allow customers to browse together, simpler website features such as “Get a Friend’s Opinion” email form can take small steps in that direction. I’m also a big fan of public wish lists, and allowing your customers to create and customize profiles on your site.
4. Social Proof: No one wants to be the first to try a product. When perusing the aisles of a store, its not hard to see what sells and what collects dust. You can also observe the shopping behaviors of other customers. Where do your online shoppers go to see what’s popular? Do you allow customers to sort by popularity or reviews on your category pages?
5. Product Bundling: Walk into any department store, and you’ll find products grouped together not only by category, but by common purpose. Some clothing stores have a shop by outfit feature, a perfect example of bundling. Product bundling not only serves to raise the average basket size, but it helps customers see practical  benefits from a group of products. After all, what’s more appealing, a t-shirt by itself, or a whole new look you can show off to friends on the weekend?
6. Location Matters: Setting up shop in a prime location makes all the difference. How does location translate in the online world? Domain names and search engine results. Are you on a busy street corner (Google results page 1) or a desolate backroad (Google results page 29). Is your virtual location (domain name) easily communicated, and credible sounding? Cheap-Laptop-Computers.com may help for SEO, but will it ever spread like wildfire via word to mouth?
7. Answers Matter: Have you ever made a serious in-store purchase without asking the store employee at least one question? Unknown millions have been lost in e-commerce due to unanswered questions due to inept product pages (And no, FAQ pages are not the solution) What about letting your customers answers questions for each other, like BackCountry’s Product Wall Q&A feature?. Customers are more than eager to help each other. The problem is most sites don’t let them.

Yes, we have a lot to learn from our traditional retail brethren. I’m excited to see how online retail transforms over the next few years. We’re still just a bunch of toddlers wobbling around in brave new world

I’ve recently been reflecting on lessons I’ve learned through this exciting but tumultuous experience. What follows is a list of 6 lessons I’ve learned, often the hard way. I hope these lessons are helpful to your business as well.

Lesson #1: Serve your Customers Offensively

All businesses give lip service to good customer service, and yet few are known for the truly remarkable kind. I believe this is due to a defensive rather than an offensive approach to customer care. Too much emphasis is placed on serving customers who initiate contact with the company rather than the company initiating contact with them. Would you be considered a good friend if you never called? Probably not. Your customers aren’t impressed that you answer the phone with a friendly voice, that’s an expectation. Do the unexpected. Call or email them first. Actually listen and respond to all feedback. Publicity recognize them. You can’t win in sports if you’re always on the defense. Neither will you win the hearts of your customers if you never go on the offense.

Lesson #2: Don’t Listen to Your Best Customers

Hear me out on this one. Over the last few years, I’ve succumbed to complacency in areas of our business because I believed the feedback I was getting. We sent out surveys. We brought customers in-house for testing. Everybody loved the website. Customers gave nothing but praise. The problem was in who we were getting our feedback from. When you poll your customers for feedback, understand that your best customers will respond. These are the ones you need the feedback from the least. They already love you, and probably don’t want anything to change. And yet growth necessitates change. Seek out the kind of feedback that is painful, but necessary.

Lesson #3: Redesign for Customer Needs, not Internal Ones

One of the most dangerous temptations in web business is to constantly be redesigning a website. Rather than driven by customer needs, these incessant redesigns are usually motivated by the company getting tired of their existing design. Website overhauls that are driven by anything but customer needs are a colossal waste of time and money. Trust me, we’ve done extensive overhauls that took months, and yet customers barely noticed, and conversion didn’t change.

Lesson #4: Deploy when you’re 80% finished

I don’t believe in perfection, especially when it comes to web development. While you’re busy getting to perfect, your competitors are stealing market share. There is no such thing as a perfect launch, so the sooner you discover the problems the better. If you launch your website improvements and new features when they’re 80% ready, and you’ll instantly gain priceless feedback your development team would never have encountered in testing.

Lesson #5 Create a Flexible Development Culture

I’ve been blessed to work with a group of incredibly gifted developers and designers who can adapt to any situation and meet any deadline. A flexible developer will realize that meeting a deadline is more important than 100% fully complaint code. (I’ve actually not hired incredibly gifted designers because they told me they couldn’t put out a page that wasn’t 100% standards compliant.) A flexible attitude is key. When you run an idea by your development team, are they excited for the challenge or give you a million reasons why it can’t be done or it will take too long?

Lesson #6: Don’t sell the product

The sooner you realize it’s not the product you’re selling, the better. C28 doesn’t sell clothing, but rather a way for its customers to express deeply held faith beliefs through clothing. When you address the ultimate need, your customers will see you as more than a business, but part of their lives. Sell the experience. Sell the meaning. Just don’t sell the product, that’s what your competitors do.

What are your top lessons you’ve learned the hard way?

As much as customer service is all the rage, and heralded as the new marketing, it’s still viewed as a cost-center by most online businesses. This I believe, is entirely due to a defensive approach to customer care.

Defensive customer service can be defined as any type of reactive customer servicing such as answering calls, responding to email inquiries, or responding to live chat sessions.

Providing good defensive customer service will never result in a flood of new business for two reasons:

1. You will only have personal contact with a fraction of your total customers. (those who have questions, problems, etc.) Only this small segment will be impacted by your excellent service. Note the uniqueness of this situation, in a brick-and-mortar world, you do have personal contact with each and every customer.
2. Good service is an expectation. Yes, some companies like Zappos go above and beyond customer expectations with extraordinarily helpful service, including referring customers to competitors for products they don’t stock. But for the most part, good service is a requirement for doing business.

At it’s very best, good defensive customer service will only prevent you from losing what you already have. It will not, by itself, create hoards of new word of mouth business. Unless… you change the paradigm.

What if you were able to reduce needless, defensive interactions through high-cost touch points (phone, chat, email) and with the time saved, start a offensive customer care plan that will actually add value?

Consider these powerful, yet rarely used tactics:

• VIP Recognition: Do your top customers know that they’re your top customers? They should. An outgoing phone call to a VIP customer is ten times as valuable as taking an incoming call. Come up with a system in which you regularly recognize these VIPs, and do something special for them.
• Customer Welcoming: Want to knock their socks off? Give brand new customers a call shortly after they place their order. Thank them for trusting your business and ask for feedback.
• Give them Feedback on their Feedback: It’s not uncommon for an online business to ask for customer feedback, but rarely do businesses respond to such suggestions. C28 makes it a habit to respond to every single customer suggestion left on their website. The response from customers is utter shock. “You actually read those suggestions?” most say.
• Customer Apology Program: Mistakes happen. Unfortunately, sincere apologies usually don’t. Learning the art of an effective apology will greatly exceed the expectations of your customers. Imagine getting a call from a manager, who apologizes for a lost shipment, and offers a discount on the order for the inconvenience. This is not expected. This adds value.

Sounds great, but how can you possibly have time to implement the ideas above? Here’s some ideas for reducing the load of defensive customer interactions.

1. Have a thorough FAQ / Knowledge Base: Every reasonable question should be answered in advance on your site. Ask your customer service team for help with this, they know what type of inquiries occur repetitively.
2. Answer questions contextually: FAQ pages are good, but few people have the patience to search through your site looking for an answer. By placing answers to common questions within the context of where the question is raised, you’ll prevent countless unnecessary calls and emails. For example, if customers are constantly asking when their shipment will arrive, include an estimated delivery date on the order confirmation page or shipping receipt.
3. Let customers help each other: Shoes.com brilliantly allows shoppers to ask questions about a specific product that can be answered by someone who owns that product. After all, who really knows a product more, someone who owns it or a customer service rep?

Start small. Over the next month, can you shift 5% of your customer service time from defensive to offensive tactics? 10% the next month, and so on? Give your customers the attention and care they deserve. I guarantee you’ll see a difference.

We rarely think of it this way, but every button, every subject line, every headline on our website is a promise. Whether or not that promise is kept determines whether we win the trust of our visitors, or lose them for good.

To illustrate, let’s take a look at a fictional shopping scenario, not unlike an experience that happened to me recently.

1. Customer receives an email from electronics retailer with subject line “HDTV’s Starting at $700″
2. Customer opens email and finds a graphic showing only 1 TV and no details. BROKEN PROMISE: Subject line promised an HDTV for $700, but email contains no support for this theme
3. Customer clicks on Button that says “Shop HDTV’s”, and is taken to the website’s homepage, which differs completely in the look and feel of the email creative. BROKEN PROMISE: Button claimed to let visitors begin shopping the TV models, instead they’re left stranded on a seemingly unrelated page
4. Visitor reaches HDTV category page displaying dozens of HDTV models. The $700 model is the last item on page 5. BROKEN PROMISE: This retailer made it very difficult find the $700 TV model promised in the subject line
5. Once on product page, customer clicks “Add to Cart”
6. Customer lands on a page upselling the extended warranty. BROKEN PROMISE: Customer received no confirmation that item has been added to cart

Here’s some other common examples of broken promises:

• Homepage gets SEO’d for a specific product, and ranks. Yet when a Google searcher lands on this page, they must again navigate to a category page in order to find what they were searching for
• Shopping Cart total changes when shipping & tax charges are added late in the checkout process
• Item is shown to be out of stock after added to the shopping cart, yet product page did not indicate a stockout
• Customer opt-ins to email list, and doesn’t receive follow up for weeks

Keeping your promises requires staying consistent. So what elements must be kept consistent in order to ensure a smooth transition from page to page? Here’s 4 to keep in mind:

1. Consistent Design: Even the design of a web page makes a promise, that is, it implies a specific theme will be kept constant during the experience. Colors, graphics, fonts all need to stay constant in order to make the visitor feel safe and secure.
2. Consistent Voice: Your visitors will notice, maybe subconsciously, if the writing style changes from page to page, or step to step. Keep it consistent by having one writer do everything.
3. Consistent Messaging: Don’t call your promo a “48 Hour Closeout Sale” in your email and a “2 Day Clearance Event” on your landing page.
4. Create Logical Flow: Create a logical flow by setting expectations for the next page. One way to do this is ensuring that the call to action text on first page equals header on the subsequent page. For example, if the button on your email reads “Compare HDTV’s”, the header of the landing page should read the same. This ensures continuity, lessening the chance that a visitor will feel they landed on the wrong page.

There’s a fine line between making big promises and setting the bar too high. Take a fresh look at your site today through the eyes of a promise maker. Are you keeping them?

Below are 10 eCommerce startup mistakes I’ve encountered while working with online businesses. Specifically, many of these blunders are made by companies who are taking a traditional business online for the first time.

#1 – Blowing the budget on web development and neglecting marketing:

In the brick and mortar world, you get free traffic just by setting up shop on the street corner. The same does not apply for eCommerce. The “if you build it, they will come” mentality still exists in the minds of zealous, first time internet entrepreneurs. If you want a successful website, plan on spending as much on marketing and optimization in the first year as you pay for developing the site.

#2 – Getting Stuck in Endless Cycles of Design Revisions:

In traditional marketing or store operations, you have to get it right the first time, because it’s too expensive to redo your store signage a week after you open. However, the tools available to you online allow you to easily evolve and optimize your website overtime. As General George Patton once said, “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” The same applies to websites. Don’t expect a perfect website on day one. Rather than focusing on perfection, make a commitment to optimization after the website launches.

#3 – Forgetting people can’t touch your products:

This point may seem painfully obvious, but its often overlooked because companies know their products a little too well. It’s amazing how many eCommerce sites neglect appropriate zoom-in photos, contextual photos, and product descriptions. Take a look at the top performing websites in your niche, and pay close attention to how they describe and picture their products.

#4 – Not realizing website visitors aren’t as committed as store visitors

It’s easy for business owners to imagine a website visitor in the same way they perceive an in-store visitor. This is a serious mistake. While it’s not uncommon for retail stores to experience conversion rates of over 50% (half of the people who enter the store buy). a 3% conversion rate for website, would be considered acceptable. Why this disparity? It all comes down to commitment. The amount of commitment required to get in the car and drive yourself  to a retail store is much greater than the commitment from a casual surfer who clicks on your website from Google. In the physical world, your competitor is 10 minutes away. Online, they’re a few clicks away.

What does this mean? It means that any obstacle, large or small, that gets in the way of buying process will cause lost sales. It also means that you must add value to the customer experience, especially if you sell the same products as your competitors.

#5 – Using Print media for online media:

You know that killer flyer you made for your big sale event? Odds are it makes a terrible email blast. What about the retail catalog you invested so much on? It too, is likely very ineffective as an online version. Print and online media may be similar in some ways, but there are more differences than similarities. When choosing a designer for your website or online marketing projects, make sure they have significant experience with online creative, not just print media.

#6 – Ignoring Online Trust Issues:

In the face to face real world security, and privacy are rarely top concerns for customers. eCommerce, however, is inherently “taxed” with a low-trust environment, causing visitors to doubt the legitimacy of your site. You must go the extra mile to assuage these perfectly rational fears. This includes assuring customers of their information is secure, and that you value their privacy.

#7 – Having a “Home Page equals the Website” mentality:

In countless situations, I have seen companies place too much emphasis on the homepage, particularly the graphics, and woefully neglect other critical pages such as the product or category pages. A recent company I work with was surprised to learn that total pageviews of their homepage represented less than 4% of overall pageviews on their website. Yes, the homepage is important, but don’t go overboard and ignore other essentials.

#8 -Chasing After Every Internet Fad

Don’t go chasing after the latest and greatest internet marketing tactic or ecommerce feature. Yes, there are many exciting new tools and marketing tactics out there, but focus on the sure-fire methods first, such as search marketing, email marketing, and website usability. There’s much to be said about innovation and trying new things, but take every opportunity with a grain of salt, considering the opportunity cost.

#9 – Not Understanding or Caring about Web Analytics:

You can read a balance sheet, now make a commitment to understanding basic website analytics. In a physical store, the idea of analyzing customer activity is far fetched and impractical. For this reason, business owners often never realize the potential of not just monitoring but acting upon web analytics data. It’s vital that someone in the organization can understand and interpret web analytics.

#10 – Failing to Integrate your In-Store & Online Channels Early on:

Many large click-and-mortar retailers are still struggling to seamlessly integrate their in-store and online channels. Channel conflict, price discrepancies, and a siloing mentality are common, causing brand confusion for your customers. Many store managers believe promoting an eCommerce website will steal store sales. Make sure to educate your store staffers early on, highlighting the many synergies of online and in-store retailing.

I’ve listed 10 “don’t s”, now what about what you should do? If you had one tip to give an ecommerce startup business, what would it be?

About Justin Palmer

Justin Palmer is the owner of Palmer Web Marketing, a strategic web marketing consulting firm. Justin also runs MedSaverCard.com, a Medicine Discount Card offering up to 80% off prescriptions for drugs not covered by insurance.

You have plenty of other blog posts to read or emails in your inbox beckoning for your attention. Even if you commit to reading this you may be distracted by a ringing cellphone or a text message. Or maybe your brain will suddenly remember that proposal you had promised to send out 3 hours ago. Just as you may abandon this post, at this very moment, dozens of visitors may be leaving your website for similar reasons.

When optimizing our websites, we often focus (and rightly so) on elements such as web forms, buttons, product pages, shopping carts, etc. It’s easy to forget the countless external factors that affect the attention of our customers.

Preventing Controllable Distractions

Many distractions, such as calls from customers or bosses can’t be prevented, but some are within our control, such as:

• Ads on your website. If you’re currently using ads to supplement your income on a e-commerce site, seriously consider the professionalism and effectiveness of this tactic, as ads offer one more needless distraction.
• Cluttered checkout. This could include not removing navigation during the checkout process, or showing too many upsells/crossells too late in the checkout process.
• Make Your Site Design Good, but Not Too Good. Web design can be a double-edged sword. Professional, attractive, and usable design will put the focus where it belongs, on the products. On the other hand, overly animated or creative design can be a distraction, focusing too much attention on the website rather than what’s being sold.
• Too many fields, too little time. Do your web forms stay on a need to know basis, or are you quizzing your customers for information you’ll never use?
  

Are You Stressing Urgency?

Does your website give visitors any sense of urgency to complete a transaction? If you’re running a sale, do you clearly communicate the end date? If you’re offering merchandise at a permanent mark-down price, have you reminded customers this item will not be re-stocked? Customers assume there’s safety in later. It’s our job to refute that idea, and close the sale now.

Have a Killer UVP

If visitors feel your product is a commodity, you have already lost the battle for their attention. From the moment a prospect lands on your website, you must differentiate the heck out of their experience.  If your unique value proposition (e.g. free shipping on returns, 110% price guarantee, 10% of sales donated to charity, etc.) is not clearly communicated as early as possible, then customers are prone to choose another option, namely your competitor with a lower price. While you can never prevent interruptions, the best you can do is convince a customer that what they are currently doing (shopping on your site) is more important than that pressing distraction.

Does your Site Have An Express Lane?

Try this experiment: Time yourself on how quickly you can complete a transaction on your website. Better yet, ask someone unfamiliar with your site to place an order as fast as they can. If its not humanly possible to complete a transaction in a short period of time (say 3 minutes), then the odds of your visitors abandoning their effort due to distractions greatly increases.

Re-capturing Lost Opportunities

Of course there is no foolproof way to prevent external distractions, but there are some effective tactics for re-capturing lost prospects. One of my clients sends personalized emails to every customer who abandons their shopping cart, asking if there was a problem preventing them from completing their purchase. One of the more typical responses, not surprisingly, goes something like this, “There’s nothing wrong with your website, I just got distracted and didn’t finish my purchase.” In addition to sending cart reminders, make it a priority to capture email addresses. Personally, I will subscribe to a website that I find interesting at the moment, but I’m too busy to buy or dig deeper. Another tactic would be encouraging bookmarks, whether browser based or through a social bookmarking service such as Delicious.

Quite possibly, this very blog post is an interruption in your day, maybe distracting you from accomplishing something more important. But since I kept your attention this long, hopefully you’ll take away a practical tidbit from this article, or will leave a comment with your own input.

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With web forms playing such an important role in the completing goals, it goes without saying that we should optimize the heck out of them. Below are 25 tips for doing just that.

1. Ditch the Captchas: Captcha’s are great for blocking spam, but some evidence suggests they are just as good at blocking conversions. A little spam isn’t the end of the world, and definitely isn’t worth losing conversions over. If you must use a Captcha, make sure it’s easy to read.
2. Remove Unnecessary Fields: Do you really need to ask for your customers date of birth and gender? Even if your customers aren’t concerned about privacy issues, odds are they’re lazy and might just abandon your excessively inquisitive form. Here’s some great advice from Get Elastic on registration forms.
3. Keep It Simple: Just because we can use CSS to do all sorts of fancy things with text boxes, doesn’t mean we should. Keeping form fields simple will ensure that customers understand their purpose and won’t confuse them with design elements.
4. Clear the Clear Button: Having a clear button next to the submit button just makes it easier for customers to accidentally delete what they’ve entered. Skip this unnecessary feature.
5. Cancel the Cancel Button: In the case of long or multi-part form pages, such as checkouts, don’t give customers the option to cancel their decision. That’s equivalent to a commission driven salesperson asking, “Do you really want to buy this?”
6. Label Required Fields: People want to do as little as possible. For this reason, let your customers know what they are required to fill out with an asterisk or similar label.
7. Use Point of Action References: If customers are getting confused by the information you’re asking for in a particular field, include a small note with a popup link with more information. For example, one of the most common POA references is an explanation of the 3 digit CVV code found on the back of credit cards.
8. Show Formatting Examples: Some fields should have notes showing how to format them, depending on your database requirements. For example, you might want phone number formatted in a certain way, with or without parenthesis, dashes, etc. In general though, keep these formatting requirements to a minimum in order to keep it simple for customers.
9. Make it International Friendly: Forms requiring an address can be confusing if they’re built only with US residents in mind. Check out these detailed guidelines for building international friendly forms.
10. Allow Easy Forward and Backward Movement: Customers rarely maneuver through our website the way we intend them to. In order words, they hit the back button, the forward button, refresh, etc. Depending on how your forms pass data, this could cause error messages such as “this page has expired”. Make sure you test the forward and backward flow of any multiple page forms on your site.
11. Logical Tab Sequence: Don’t you hate it when you hit tab, and rather than going to the next field, the focus moves somewhere else on the page? This problem is likely due to the way the form is laid out with HTML tables. Make sure your forms tabs in a logical sequence to prevent customers from accidentally skipping fields.
12. Server Side Validation: There’s 2 ways to ensure that your visitors are entering correct data into fields. You can use client-side scripting (such as Javascript which is browser dependent) or server side error processing. In addition to server side validation being less reliant on the user’s browser settings, it’s also more secure.
13. Clear Error Messages: When displaying error messages when customers enter invalid data, make sure your messages are clear and well placed. This means saying “Please enter an email address” rather than something vague like “you must fill out all fields.” A best practice is taking them right back to the field with incorrect data, and displaying the error message next to it.
14. Show What’s Needed When Its Needed: It’s best to hide form fields until you know they are absolutely needed. For example, if you already know your user is from the US, you can dynamically hide the province field and show the state drop down box instead.
15. Logical List Order: When using drop down lists or radio button lists, make sure you order them in a logical way, listing items higher if they are selected more often. In other words, if 90% of your customers buy from the USA, don’t list Afghanistan as your first option, and United States at the very bottom.
16. AJAX Validation: Some sites have begun to validate form inputs as soon as the user tabs out of the field. This can be very effective, since it does not break the flow of the process. Its easier to correct an error immediately after entering it rather than after the whole form is completed.
17. Remember Me Feature: For login forms, allow customers to choose a “remember me” option, which uses a cookie to fill in login information the next time. Who wants to remember all those passwords anyway?
18. Set Focus: When a page loads containing a forms, sending the cursor to the first required field will prevent users from having to click into the field in order to start typing. This can be accomplished with a simple JavaScript function.
19. Avoid Obnoxious Password Requirements: Ever received this annoying error? “Your password must contain at least one letter, number, and be least X number of digits.” Requiring passwords to be formatted a certain way may help security, but it will likely discourage return visits since visitors must now remember an unfamiliar password.
20. Progress Indicators: For forms that span multiple pages, include a progress indicator letting people know where they are in the process. These are most commonly seen during checkout and would include steps such as “Shipping Info > Payment Info > Receipt Confirmation.”
21. Minimize Scrolling & Pages: A good case can be made to limit the number of pages in a a multi-part form in order to prevent customers from abandoning. However, an opposing case can also be made than ridiculously long, single pages forms that require scrolling can scare off customers. There’s no sure-fire rule here, its a perfect opportunity to perform your own a/b test.
22. Strong Call to Action Buttons: Sometimes “Submit” just doesn’t cut it. In other words, be specific and action oriented with your form buttons.
23. Use External Labels: Have you ever used a form that labeled the field with text that disappears when you click into it? This can be a great space saver, but extremely confusing if a customer forgets what the field is for since the label has disappeared. Here’s a great example of why external form labels are more effective.
24. Prioritize Size and Location of Multiple Button Forms: On a form with multiple action buttons, make sure you emphasize the most important button leading to the conversion. For example, if your final order confirmation screen has 2 buttons, “Finalize Order” and “Edit Order”, make sure the “Finalize Order” button is larger and more prominent.
25. Clear Confirmations: Have you ever filled out a long, tedious form, clicked submit, only to be returned to what seems like the same page with the form empty? You can do everything right with your form, but if you drop the ball on the confirmation, your customers will be helplessly confused. In addition to making a clear confirmation message, check out these other tips to prevent wasting your confirmation page.

So what are your thoughts? Have any other form optimization tips to add?

Like these 25 tips? Here’s 192 more.

About Justin Palmer

Justin Palmer is the founder of Palmer Web Marketing, an internet marketing and e-commerce consultancy. Justin’s current project is MedSaverCard.com, a pharmacy discount card & county RX discount card program for the under-insured in America.