5 Powerful Tips for the eCommerce Holiday Season

As a follow up to the webinar 5 Powerful tips for the eCommerce Holiday Season we are posting this blog to highlight the five tips along with our Q and A session.

The 5 Powerful Tips:

1. Clean Up Your Image

Excite potential buyers with more views. Add multiple angles/sides of each image and show them in a real world setting—i.e. upload an image of someone wearing a shirt, or display patio furniture outdoors. Ty recommended that you allow customers to upload pictures of themselves with the product. This helps to show the products versatility in a fun way. Product videos are growing in popularity. By adding videos you are keeping up with an emerging trend and adding a cool feature to you site.

1. Shipping Intervention

Free shipping is almost expected by shoppers. Run shipping promotions such as “free shipping on all orders over $50” or “Free shipping until midnight” to increase your UPT and create a sense of urgency. With a shortened holiday season (28 shopping days), you’ll want to cater to the various types of shoppers. Offer expedited shipping to last minute shoppers and delayed shipping for the early bird shoppers. To go along with some of your shipping promotions, you will want to have shopping cart addendum or a message (wait—add $XX dollars to your order to qualify for free ground shipping).

1. Improve Your Social Skills

Promote your Facebook posts. For a relatively low price, you can increase the visibility your posts get and advertise to a wider audience. In addition, you should encourage social chatter. Share a cool story or interesting post and encourage your followers to comment. It’s a fun way to engage with your customers and fans without being too sales-y. With the rise of mobile devices, it’s important to be mobile conscience. Make sure your site is responsive or optimized for mobile devices so your shoppers can enjoy a wonderful shopping experience regardless of their device.

1. Sell On Amazon

“Amazon is King”—with 209 million users you can increase you store’s visibility by selling on Amazon. In addition, Amazon is “positioning pawns” by selling phones and tablets to encourage shopping on their platform. Amazon clearly has a great deal of influence and you can only benefit by choosing to sell with them. It is also worth noting that Amazon advertises for you. Amazon is very involved with Google Ad Words and you will have promoted ads reflecting your store. Finally, a platform like Nexternal allows you to easily manage your orders from Amazon, as they will show up with all of your site orders, with an Amazon logo next to it indicating where it came from.

1. Analytics

Look at your data. Analyze it. See what works and what does not. You should analyze everything from your shipping services to your credit card processors. There could be more efficient ways and better deals for you to take advantage of. Be in a position for years end to plan for the upcoming year. Make changes and increase your profits. Set goals—set one for 2014 and 2015. Keep them visible and make them happen.

Q&A Session Recap:

• How do you add video to a Nexternal product?

Upload your video to YouTube first. Once the video is on YouTube you can press the share button and ‘embed’ an HTML code to your product description.

• What social network do you suggest we use the most?

Different industries can have different success. Pinterest drives the most eCommerce sales.  Pinterest is valuable to visually rich products. Facebook, Twitter, and

• Do you have any recommendations for video software?

For a quick fix, you can use you iPhone and iMovie Maker App. Also, ScreenFlow is relatively inexpensive and designed for mac users. Camtasia is good for PC users.

• What is the most successful shipping promotion you’ve seen work best for your clients

Free shipping will yield the most successful followed by expedited shipping options. Shoppers want to get their product faster, and expedited shipping is a great way to cater to them.