Google has raised the bar. If you misspell a word, it tells you. If you perform a search returning millions of results, they prioritize the results by showing you the most relevant page (usually).

Compare that to most internal site search features on eCommerce sites. Not only can they not handle misspellings, they usually to a poor job of ranking results. Combine a poor site search feature with a confusing navigation, and you’ve got a usability nightmare. Below I’ve gathered up 11 ideas for improving your internal site search feature.
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Christmas is over, and now the fun begins…. the Handling the returns. As anyone whose ever sent a product back to an online retailer knows, the process is almost as fun as going to the dentist.

Some research suggests that even the thought of sending back a return is enough to keep people from buying. As such, it makes sense that an easy, hassle free return procedure will ensure that customers order again. In this post, I’ll share some best practices for handling return I’ve learned from dealing with internet retailers in the past.

1. Answer the Basics: Clearly explaining the process is the obvious first step in handling a return. Chinook Webs has a great example of an effective return policy that answers what, when, where, and how. For example, what products can be returned? How long do customers have to return them? Where do they back the merchandise?
2. Keep Customers Updated: When you receive a return shipment, email the customer. When you begin processing a return, email the customer. When you refund their money or send out the exchange merchandise, email the customer. Constant progress updates will keep customers from contacting you about the status. In addition, they will appreciate the thoughtfulness.
3. Find out Why: A “no questions asked” return policy is great marketing, but tells you little about what’s causing customers to return products. Find a non-pushy way of asking them why they’re returning the merchandise. This can be a simple question on the return form or an email survey sent out after the transaction. Emphasize the information will be used to improve your products.

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Tags: customer service E commerce e commerce return policies ecommerce return best practices internet returns simplifying the online return process

When was the last time you actually took the time to find an answer on a FAQ page? What about searching through a customer service knowledge base?

For me, if information I need is not immediately accessible, I will leave a website immediately. Likewise, most web customers are impatient and demand information at their finger-tips. In the post, I thought I would share some common questions I have throughout the buying process on a website. If questions such as these are answered on the spot, rather than through a hard to find FAQ page or knowledge base, I am much more likely to buy.

Product Pages:

When a customer reaches the product page for an item he or she is considering purchasing, many questions arise. The suggestions below are in addition to the obvious questions about the product itself. We’re going to assume that your product pictures and description answer those.

• Is the product in-stock? - Most of us have received an unwelcome email from an internet store telling us our item is out of stock. If you are confident in your inventory counts, assure your customer that the item they are viewing is in-stock and ready to ship.
• How much will shipping cost? - Seeing the product price is not enough. Mentally, customers want to figure in the cost of shipping as well. Reminders about free shipping are welcome sight on the product page.
• Where can I find similar products? - Showing related products (make sure they are relevant) can greatly decrease the bounce rate of your product pages. They increase the likelihood than your visitor will continue browsing if they aren’t interesting in the item they are viewing.

Shopping Cart Page:

Battles of conversion are often lost on the shopping cart page due to unanswered questions.

• What’s in my cart? - Customers tend to forget which items are in their shopping carts. Simply showing the name of the product isn’t enough. All shopping carts should show pictures of the items to help customers remember what they’re buying.
• How do the items in my cart compare with each other? - Shopping carts are often used for comparison shopping, not as a final repository for items that will be purchased. By allowing users to view relevant product features in a side by side comparison, you’ll simplify the buying decision.
• How can I pay? - At this point, customers begin thinking about payment options. Showing credit card logos, the PayPal emblem, and other 3rd party payment option logos will give users the confidence to continue.
• What is your return policy? - When I used to work in retail, the number one question asked of me at the cash register was “what is your return policy?” A link to a pop-up explaining your “hassle free returns policy” would be helpful in the shopping cart.

Contact Information (during Checkout)

When you begin asking for personal contact information, red flags may go off in your customer’s mind.

• What is this website’s privacy policy? - How is the information you are capturing used? Will it be used for marketing, 3rd parties, or only for order fulfillment? A link to your privacy policy would be much appreciate by many customers.
• What info is necessary? - Be sure to clarify what information is necessary and what is optional. Most site’s do this with a simple asterisk (*) to denote a required field.
• Can I opt-out? - Many customers are paranoid about being added to a mailing list. It’s not worth losing an order over, so provide a check box that allows shoppers to opt out of marketing communications.

Shipping Information (during Checkout)

Shipping is always an area of uncertainty and confusion. If customers can’t be assured their package will arrive safe, sound, and in-time, they will abandon the order. I’m surprised at how few eCommerce sites link to their shipping policies from the checkout pages.

• How will my order ship? - Customers sometimes have preferences as to which carrier will be used. Providing this information will assuage their concerns.
• When will my product ship? - Make sure customers understand the processing time involved. If possible, always ship next business day.
• Do you ship to PO Boxes, APOs or International addresses? - Linking to your shipping policy will ensure customers understand your shipping restrictions.

Payment Information (during Checkout)

Even after years of shopping on the internet, I still find myself hesitating a moment before entering my credit card information. All sorts of questions arise at this point in the conversion funnel.

• Is the transaction secure? - Having click-through verification through your SSL provider is a good faith measure.
• How do I input my credit card number? - If your payment page requires a certain format for entering credit card information, such as no dashes between the numbers, be sure to specify that.
• Where do I find the CVV Code? - Personally, I dislike requiring the 3 or 4 digit CVV code in order to process a payment. However, if your site uses it, be sure to link to a good description of what is is, where to find it, and why it is being asked for.

Receipt (Order Confirmation) Page:

Online retailers too often waste their receipt pages by displaying an order confirmation page that basically says, “thank you for your order, now get off our website.” Receipt pages are a great place to preemptively answer common customer service inquiries.

• When will my product ship? - Now that your customer has handed over their money, when will you deliver the merchandise?
• When will my product arrive? - Providing delivery estimates from your shipping carrier(s) will prevent needless inquiries to your customer service department. Don’t over-promise, just give honest shipping time estimates to the delivery location.
• How do I track my order? - From the moment the order is placed, customers expect to be able to monitor the progress of the processing and shipping of their order. Linking to your order tracking page would be very much appreciated.
• How can I change my order? - The order confirmation page is often the place where the customer realizes they screwed up and ordered the wrong product or entered incorrect shipping information. Providing information on how to edit their order will prevent them from panicking.

The suggestions above are by no means exhaustive, so please leave your comments with other common questions you see during the checkout process.

Ahh the shipping page. The un-welcome step in every eCommerce site’s checkout process. Because many sites fail to answer basic questions such as “how long will it take?” or “how much will it cost?”, many sales are lost at this important juncture. Some research shows that shipping concerns top the list of reasons why people abandon shopping carts. Below, I’ve listed some shipping best practices that I’ve used that help streamline the process for both the consumer and the company.

1. Don’t Require Login to View Pricing: Don’t make your customers jump through hoops in order to get a shipping price. Customers should be able to see the cost for shipping on the shopping cart page. If you base your prices on the location where the order will be shipped, give people the ability to enter their zip code for a quote.
2. Info on Product Page: Questions about shipping should be addressed early and often. A popup link on the product page is a great way to give customers price quotes or shipping time estimates.
3. Link to Shipping Page from Shopping Cart: In the shopping cart where customers select the shipping method, be sure to link to a page with more information regarding each option. On this page, specify estimated delivery dates for each region.

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Tags: E commerce Website Usability

E-tailers have a lot to learn from traditional retailers. It seems that well-known eCommerce sites get away with atrocious usability mistakes simply because the internet as a shopping medium is growing so fast. Web managers may think that because sales numbers are up they must be doing everything right. For many online stores, nothing is further from the truth. Below I’ve listed what I consider to be the worst practices of eCommerce sites these days.

1. Requiring Login to Order: I would agree with Get Elastic’s Linda Bustos that this is one of many e-tailers’ favorite usability mistakes. Requiring registration is very obnoxious, especially when you have yet to establish any relationship with a retailer, and you have not idea if you’ll ever purchase again.
2. Not Showing Shipping Prices Upfront: I’ve abandoned dozens of online orders because of this. Sure, asking for the customers address may ensure a more accurate shipping cost for you, but its not worth losing a customer over. In my opinion, the best practice is to simply base your shipping costs on the merchandise total. It might not be the most accurate way, but if you average it out, it works great.
3. Vague, Hard to Find Return Policies: For me, returning products to an online retailer is right up there with getting my teeth drilled. Don’t make the process worse by hiding your return policy deep within your site or requiring your customers to jump through hoops to complete the process. Rarely do e-tailers make their return policy a selling point or competitive advantage. Wherever I can, I like to use the words “No-Hassle Return Policy” to reassure the customer that the process is quick and easy.
4. Poor SEO: Build it, and they will not come, unless your eCommerce site is on good terms with Google. Retailers tend to forget that search engines are the highways and byways of the internet. An eCommerce site not optimized for search is equivalent to a brick and mortar store conveniently located underground.
5. Poor Product Descriptions: Your product descriptions are the closest thing you have to an face to face salesperson. Make them work for you. Improving your product descriptions is one of the easiest, yet most neglected ways to improve your online sales. If your product catalog is large enough to justify hiring a copy-writer, than do it. If not, hire someone on the side to write your copy.
6. Lack of Filtering & Sorting: Imagine yourself walking unto a used car lot. What do you ask the salesperson in order to narrow down your options? You’ll likely say something like “show me all the vehicles this color, with this amount of mileage, or this make and model.” The same principle should be applied to your product department pages. Don’t overwhelm your audience with too many options. Let them filter down by criteria such as colors, sizes, or brand. Also, let them sort the listings by price, newness, popularity, etc.
7. Hard to Find Checkout Button: Imagine not being able to find the checkout lane at a grocery store. Many online stores assume shoppers know that the shopping cart is the first step of the checkout process. To prevent confusion of your customers, always have a clear “checkout” button visible on every page.
8. Poor Merchandising: If you owned a brick and mortar store, I’m going to bet you would walk your aisles every day to ensure your products are merchandised properly. Yet I think website owners expect their online stores to run themselves, and rarely take time for this important audit. Once a day, try to shop your store as if you were going to buy something. I’ll bet you’ll find one or two things out of place.
9. Getting too Personal: Do you really need your customer’s date of birth to complete an order? Even asking for information such as email or telephone number may arouse suspicion in your customers. Ask yourself an important question for each additional form field you add, “Is this worth losing a sale over?”
10. No Calls to Action: Don’t just assume your visitors will click on your image maps or “Click Here” links. Make your call to action buttons big, bold, and unmistakably clear. Every page of the conversion funnel (landing page to department page to product page to checkout) should clearly define the next step in the process.
11. No Error Reporting: From a technical point of view, it’s very simple to setup error notifications when certain unexpected events occur on your website. Montastic offers a completely free website monitoring service. In addition, ask your webmaster to setup email alerts for every time a 500 (internal server) error or 404 (page not found) error occurs.
12. Inaccurate Cross Sells: Embarrassing cross-sells can sometimes lead to more than just more than just missed opportunities. If your system for suggesting add-ons, cross sells, or up-sells doesn’t work, you’re probably better off not using it.
13. Unreachable Customer Service: Online retailers are typically not famous for their customer service. Phone numbers and emails should be listed prominently on every page. Responses to customer requests should be prompt and courteous. In a previous post, I outlined 25 tips for improving your online customer service.

I’m sure I didn’t mention everything, so be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts or experiences. 

Like the tips listed above? Get 3 of your own…

About PWM

Justin Palmer offers expert eCommerce consulting and SEO consulting in Orange County, California. Justin also has written an e-Commere e-book entitled The e-Commerce Roadmap.

In some ways, it seems search engines have a grudge against eCommerce sites. Often times, I don’t blame them. Many online stores offer little useful content, including dry manufacturer product descriptions, poor internal linking, and no unique, user generated content. Without a doubt eCommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. Below I’ve gathered 25 tips that I’ve successfully used while optimizing eCommerce sites in the past.

1. Avoid Manufacturer Product Descriptions: It’s tempting to just copy and paste from the manufacturer’s website, but resist the urge. At the very least, re-write the description in some way to make it unique.
2. Create a SEO Keyword Field in Product Database: Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to the site, enter commonly search for keywords in this field. Not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.
3. Focus on Singular Keywords on Product Page: As a general rule, I try to optimize for plural keywords on the home page or other SEO landing pages. Focus on singular terms on the product pages by using the SEO keyword field mentioned in step 2.
4. Simple Product & Category URLs: Ideally, URLs should consist of keywords, not useless ID’s or other parameters. If you don’t have the option of using URL re-writing software, at least limit the number of variables passed in the URL.
5. All Products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page: Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. Many sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories. This can be accomplished by using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page.
6. Unique Title Tags: While it’s debatable whether the company name belongs in the beginning of the title tag, most agree you should not include extra keywords that are repeated in every tag. For example, if you company name was XYZ Travel, include only the company name in title tag, not “XYZ Travel Agency and Vacations.” Use as little duplicate content as possible in order to prevent diluting the value of the rest of the text in the title tag.
7. Unique Keyword Meta Tags: Meta tags, including keywords and description, should be entirely unique on every product page. Though meta content likely doesn’t directly affect your ranking, unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties. In addition, don’t stuff keywords into your meta tags that aren’t relevant to the specific page they are on.
8. Unique Description Meta Tags: Personally, I like putting the same product description that appears on the product page in meta description tag. This will ensure unique content on each product page.
9. Product Reviews: A great strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from your customers. Allow customers to review products they’ve purchased or comment on one’s they haven’t.
10. Pass PR Wisely: Obviously, not every page on your site deserves the same link juice. While your Return policy page is important, it likely won’t bring in loads of revenue driving traffic from organic search. Make sure your primary SEO pages, (category and products pages) receive most of the PR flow by capping PR flow on less important links. You can accomplish this via Javascript links, form submit links, the no-follow tag, or the robots.txt file.
11. Internal Contextual Links: Site navigation links don’t tell search engines very much information about the page. Within a paragraph of text, link to a relevant page using keyword rich anchor text.
12. Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the SE’s to crawl. There are ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spiders without the session ID.
13. Create a Product RSS Feed: Create a product feed and submit it to relevant content aggregators. Google Base accepts an XML like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages.
14. Product Tagging: With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
15. Page File Names: If possible, use keyword rich page file names. A page files name such as www.yoursite.com/keyword-phrase-here.html tells Googlebot a lot more than a URL such as www.yoursite.com/?ID=1234.
16. Use iframes for Duplicate Content: If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product descriptions are not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that they data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalize you for duplicate content.
17. Links in Product Descriptions: Create keyword rich links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords.
18. Crawl-able Navigation: Avoid JavaScript or css based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In additional, don’t rely on form based navigation such as drop down lists since the SEs can’t follow them.
19. Don’t Stuff Keywords in your Nav: This is useless and very tacky. Keywords that show up universally in the navigation on every page are not as important as they used to be. Instead, use keyword rich anchor text pointing to your important pages within a paragraph of relevant text.
20. Don’t Use “View” or “More”: On your product category pages, make sure you link to the individual product pages with anchor text that contains more than just words like “View” or “See more”. Vague terms such as these tell spiders nothing about your products.
21. Optimize your Images: With images now popping up in the regular SERPs, every image on your site should be optimized. Make sure all your product images contain unique alt text attributes. By simply populating the alt text with the product and brand name, I’ve seen a huge increase in traffic from Google Image search. In addition, you’re making your site more useable for the vision impaired.
22. Optimize your Internal Site Search: This is more of a usability tip, but it applies perfectly within the context of eCommerce SEO. Because your visitor found your site via a search engine, they will likely expect your internal site search to work as well. I’ve found that many first time visitors landing your site from a SERP will search for the exact same term they typed into Google.
23. Create Brand Landing Pages: If your site sells branded products that customers may be searching for, setup a optimized landing page for every brand.
24. Use Title Attributes in Links: For all anchor text on your site, be sure to use appropriate title attributes (e.g. <a href=”page.html” title=”keywords here”>) in order to provide search engines more information about what the page contains. Although not nearly as important as the actual anchor text, title attributes are factored into the ranking algorithm in some way.
25. Track Page Yield: In order to determine the effectiveness of your site as a whole, take the number of unique keywords you are found for during a given time period. Then, divide that by the number pages indexed by Google. This will give you your page yield, a good metric for measuring the length of your “long tail.”

About Palmer Web Marketing

Palmer Web Marketing offers Ethical SEO services and Expert eCommerce consulting for small to medium size businesses.

I suppose I can title this post “25 Email Marketing Mistakes I’ve Made.” But rather than focus on the negative, below I’ve outlined the best practices I’ve come to adopt over the years. Hope you find something here useful.

1. Diversify your Content: If your entire email focuses on one product, service, or topic, you risk alienating all but the few people who will be interested. Unless you have segmented your database based on previous behavior, do not send an email on only 1 topic. I consistently find that the click through rate increases in proportion with varied content.
2. Don’t Stress about Spam Words: Many experts will tell you to avoid words like “free” or “sale”. In my opinion, ISPs tend to be moving away from content based spam filtering in favor of reputation based filtering. In other words, your sending IP address and from email are more important than whether or not your email contains certain words. Personally, I’ve used words like “free” in the subject line without any affect on delivery rates.
3. Make it Readable with Images Disabled: Always take into account the appearance of your email with images disabled. For email clients such as Outlook, this is now the default feature. Even popular web mails like Hotmail now disable images unless the sender is in the address book of the recipient. The best tactic to create readable emails with images block is use an alt description.
4. Create an Online Version: Always provide an online version of your email for users having trouble viewing images. I’ve calculated from emails I’ve sent in the past that around 5% of users will use this feature.

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Tags: 25 Ways Series E commerce email marketing Internet Marketing Transactional Email Marketing

Ever since Shop.org coined the phrase “Cyber Monday” back in 2005, online retailers have realized the sales potential of this first Monday after Thanksgiving. After all, people are back at their office jobs, tired and overweight from the Thanksgiving holiday. What better to do than shop online?

 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!

Surprisingly, many ecommerce sites waste the thank you or receipt page by making it a dead end. Instead of encouraging your visitors to close the window, continue to engage your customers with one of the following tactics:

1.   Refer a friend form: After the user completes the purchase, ask them if they would be willing to tell a friend or family member about your product or service. Obviously, if they trusted you enough to give you their own money, they might be willing to recommend you to a friend.

2.   How to Track your Order: In order to prevent needless queries to your customer service department, you might consider showing customers the process for tracking their order. Show them how to login, and find out when the order has shipped and what the current status is on the delivery.

3.   Show products related to those ordered: By doing this, you might be surprised at how many people will immediately order again. Just be sure that your customer service team is prepared to deal with customer requesting to add additional items to their orders.

4.   Feedback Survey: Ask your shoppers about the experience they just had. Because the experience is fresh on their mind, they will tell you about any frustrations while using your site.

5.   Coupon for Next Purchase: Encourage customers to bounce right back with a coupon for their next purchase. Make it clear, however, that this discount cannot be used on previous purchases.

In choosing one of the above tactics, your company priorities will apply. For example, if you’re most concerned about providing preemptive customer service, then you might be inclined to use the receipt page to clarify how to track the order. If you’re more concerned about driving sales, you might choose to show related products.

A word of caution applies to these ideas. Before you encourage your customer to perform another action, make it very clear that the purchase process is complete, and order has been submitted. In addition, always send an email confirmation receipt.

By using one of the above tactics, hopefully you’ll steer clear of the mistake many ecommerce sites make on their Thank You pages and continue to build a long lasting, profitable relationship with your customers. 

Hopefully, you’ve already begun to consider any necessary improvements to your site to accommodate the influx of holiday traffic.  Below I’ve compiled holiday improvement ideas for e-commerce sites. I hope you find something here useful.

1. Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Think about how much traffic your site will receive during the holidays. 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. Make sure that this coupon is not valid until after the holidays.
2. Loosen Up on 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Determine Shipping Cut-off Dates: 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.
7. Prominent “No Hassle” Return Policy: Your return policy should be easy to find. Consider re-packaging it as a ”no hassle” policy in order to calm the fears of first time buyers.
8. 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.
9. 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 last year’s cyber Monday. Here’s a sad, but funny example of Macy’s servers getting overloaded.
10. Checkup on your Domain, Web hosting, and Merchants: God forbid that your credit card or domain name expires during the Christmas rush. Double check the basics just to be safe.
11. Audit Your Online Product Catalog: Have a detail oriented person visit each of your product pages to ensure accuracy. Check for typos, broken images, and bad hyperlinks.
12. 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.
13. Mystery Shop your Site: Either do it yourself or hire a professional service to mystery shop your site. Mystery shopping should include ordering, contacting customer service, and returning the product back to you.
14. Learn from Your Past Mistakes: Just for fun, checkout your site at Christmas time last year on the wayback machine. You’ll likely spot issues that can be improved this year.
15. Learn from Your Competitors: Also, checkout what your competition was doing last year. It may give you some tips on what or what not to do this year.
16. Build up those Wish Lists: Start encouraging your visitors to build their wish lists now. Come Christmas, they’ll know exactly where to find what they want. Check out this post for Wish list improvement ideas.
17. 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.
18. Gifts by Price: Organize and suggest gifts by price range. For example, highlight gifts under $10, 25, 50, 100 or whatever price points are appropriate for your business.
19. Gifts by Person: Organize gifts intended for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, grandparents, etc.
20. Get 404 and 500 Error Notifications: 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.
21. Stocking Stuffers: Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. These can be a great way to increase your average order total.
22. Shipping and Return Info on Product Pages: Shipping and return issues will be top of mind for your customers at this time. Assure them your policies are convenient and fair by linking to your shipping and returns page from your product pages.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. Bundle Products: Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle.

Hopefully you’ve found something here useful for your site. Be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions.