Tips for Increasing Sales at Your Online Store This Holiday

Holiday shopping creates visions of dollar signs dancing in retail store owners' heads, but it should also excite the e-commerce merchant. Online stores can expect an increase in traffic due to the 20 billion dollars worth of consumer purchases, mainly due to the desire to avoid holiday crowds in malls and the higher cost of gas involved in actually getting to the mall. The consumer traffic is there; all you need to do is figure out how to bring them to your cyberspace store.

Are you targeting existing clients, trying to attract new clients, or both? You need to identify your discount strategy and determine whether it's per product, customer, or order. Consider offering shipping discounts, because it makes potential customers who are on the fence more likely to shop online. Free shipping is a powerful incentive to avoid getting in the car and fighting traffic and crowds. Just make sure you put a firm deadline on your offers to provoke a sense of immediacy in your customer. If they understand there's a deadline on the deal for the product they want, they're more likely to purchase from you.

E-mail still remains a solid choice for compelling your current customers to your site. Let them know they're a preferred customer with a personalized e-mail from your store letting them know about the specials available for them. You can also offer them discount codes as a way to garner extra attention and produce additional sales. The value of exclusivity among your current customers (especially an exclusive deal that makes them feel special) will greatly assist a customer in deciding to purchase from you.

A mass mailing will also be beneficial around holiday time. A well- designed email will send customers with an intention to purchase something right to you and your company's website. Make sure your mailing system allows you to send messages to your list in plain text format so you can reach the largest possible number of customers. On your website, have a page with a form where customers can opt-in to your newsletter; prudent use of mass mailings can bring about repeat business even after the holiday season, and create new recurring customers.

For maximum effect, display all of your specials prominently on your main page, and emphasize the value or other positive features that can be gained by taking advantage of those offers. A well-designed advertisement using Macromedia Flash or other eye-catching graphic design that highlights the holiday promotions lends an air of consistency to your site, and gives your customers a secure feeling that your store is a permanent fixture on the Internet that won't disappear before they get their product.

You may not know it, but aside from email, web searches are the main activity of Internet users. Sponsored searches and pay-per-click advertising still have a solid ROI (return on investment), but search engine optimization will also bring new customers to your store. Make sure your web pages have a decent amount of Meta tags and utilize relevant links effectively. Too often, smaller e-commerce stores suffer in search results simply because their pages aren't static enough to be found by a search engine. A good, solid, static HTML map and creating static versions of the main pages on your web site can help raise your store out of obscurity and into a place of prominence in search engines.

As recently as a year or two ago, using an online credit service was something only available with the largest online or chain or independent retailers, but now there's a plethora of services that let you extend the option of buying now and paying later to your customer. This alone will get increased traffic to your store and give you sales you wouldn't have otherwise obtained during the season, because the thought of spending the full amount immediately is usually a dampener on the urge to buy.

One of the biggest threats facing online consumers today is that of identity theft. With a population ever-more knowledgeable of the security risk, it would be a benefit to your site if you take extra precautions to reassure your customers. There are online services now that offer verification your site is safe from hackers, as well as encryption services to prevent information from being leaked or stolen. Once these measures are in place, write a segment on your website to inform consumers of your store's security.

Lastly, an online store has a greater chance of crashing than a brick-and-mortar store has of the walls caving in. In the harsh world of instant gratification, if your page doesn't start loading immediately, you may have just lost a customer. It's an unfortunate fact of the e-commerce business, but traffic spikes can mean slower page loading time, or system failure as the site crashes. Try testing your store with different bandwidths to simulate the differences in consumers' computers. This in conjunction with testing applications can be a good preventive measure to determine what bandwidth capacity your site can handle before faltering, and is especially important when ordering extra bandwidth or storage in anticipation of the increased traffic.

Being organized and having a good strategy for the upcoming holiday season can make the time go more smoothly and give you the possibility of repeat customers after the New Year. It may even lead to the goal you've been working towards-that of growing your business.