In this slowing economy, many online retailers (myself included) were worried about this holiday season. We ramped up for our holiday season in early November with specials and regular email promotions, and it paid off. We’re predicting a 178% increase in online sales over last holiday season and a 220% increase in online sales in December alone.

There are likely several reasons for the increases… extended customer service hours, increased Pay Per Click budgets, long-tail search rankings that set us up as industry leaders inside our “niche of a niche.” We anticipated a strong holiday season and prepared by hiring additional staff early, beefing up on inventory, and adding features to our website such as date-specific messages about shipping times which decrease customer service inquiries.

In the midst of a rocky economy, my e-commerce sites and several of our clients’ websites continue to grow. How did you do this holiday season? To what do you attribute any increase or decrease in sales?

Below are the main reasons people abandon shopping carts:

• Unexpected or high shipping costs
• Total cost of purchase more than expected
• Comparison shopping
• Product was out of stock or didn’t want to wait
• Checkout process was too complicated

You can take steps to improve your checkout process and convert many more of these visitors. By simplifying checkout and shipping options, you could see your conversion rate increase by 50% or more.

Below are a few quick tips to reduce your shopping cart abandonment rates:

• Offer free or flat-rate shipping
• Post your guarantee or return policy clearly on your website
• Post your toll-free phone number on your website and shopping cart pages
• Consolidate the checkout process to as few screens as possible
• Use real-time inventory and show quantity on hand on product information pages

It’s also a good idea to do usability testing on your website. There are a lot of inexpensive tools available that will record users’ responses and even where they looked on your pages. They can provide a lot of insight into why visitors are leaving.

By 8 o’clock this morning I had already received 3 emails from online merchants. I don’t just subscribe for research, we buy almost everything online so I love a sale like anybody else.

I never would have thought an “Election Day Sale” would be a great idea, but after receiving several newsletters this morning, we hussled together one of our own and got it out the door around 8:30 AM.

The response has been amazing. Sales have skyrocketed and all from a simple text-only email newsletter. The email we sent is below:

It may just be the most important election in our country’s
history. If you haven’t already voted early, please find your
polling place and go vote today.

To say thanks for voting, TAKE 15% OFF ANY ONE PRODUCT

Use coupon code ELECTION2008 at checkout.

http://www.2bigfeet.com

If you’re not up to speed on the issues, checkout Glass Booth:
http://www.glassbooth.org

It’s a very good tool to determine where you truly stand on the
issues. You don’t have to vote like us, but be an informed
citizen and vote based on what you believe not what you see in
the media.

Also, please encourage your family and friends to do the same.

Sincerely,

Your friends at 2BigFeet.com

It’s probably too late to get an email out for Election Day, but take a look at the calendar and see how many holidays and national events occur throughout the year. These events are excellent chances to connect with your customers. Even if they don’t buy anything, it shows you’re human and care about what’s happening in the world.

StoneEdge, makers of the popular Order Manager software, have their own bailout plan. For a limited time, get 20% off StoneEdge Order Manager when you use the coupon code “BAILOUT.”

Order Manager is a backend order and customer management software that integrates with dozens of popular shopping cart and e-commerce systems. It features inventory management, customer management, order management, pick/pack/shipping and reporting functionality.

We have been using Order Manager for years to manage our e-commerce businesses. It streamlines the order processing and customer service and lets you focus on more important issues with running your business.

These numbers are incredibly amazing, but are these conversion rates realistic for small e-commerce merchants? I have personally seen small e-commerce retailers with conversion rates between 8-10%. Compared to the national average of 2%, I’d say that’s pretty substantial.

These large companies spend millions of dollars on branding and marketing, which must be considered when looking at their conversion rates. Their customer acquisition cost is likely much higher than small merchants selling the same type of products. They may even lose money on the initial sale, knowing they’ll make it back over the lifetime of the customer.

What does all this mean to small e-commerce merchants?

Strive for somewhere in the middle. Don’t settle for 2%, but don’t go crazy trying to get your conversion rate to 25%. Always keep making changes, testing, and making more changes to continuously increase your conversion rate.

Don’t let people tell you that 8% or 10% conversion rates are unattainable though. They are very attainable. Though conversion rates will vary from industry to industry, 10% conversion rates are fairly common among small to medium sized merchants.

Other factors to consider…

Other factors can greatly affect your conversion rates. A website’s conversion rates will vary greatly depending on the source of the visitor. Visitors from organic search, PPC advertisements, referral links and direct type-in traffic will all have distinctly different conversion rates.

Marketing promotions can have a big impact on conversion rates. Specials and coupons have a big impact on conversions, though they may decrease the average profit per order.

TrackThePack is very simple to integrate and just requires a short JavaScript snippet be added to one of your pages with the tracking number inserted. Most people will want to use some kind of form, so I’ve put together a simple script that will let you create links to send to customers in emails, but will also allow a user to copy/paste a tracking number into a form field. I’ve posted some sample PHP code at the end of the post.

TrackThePack offers their API and tracking service for as little as $0.02 per tracked package. Users can track their package as many times as they want - you’re charged per tracking ID not per lookup.

I integrated TrackThePack into 2BigFeet.com and just had to change a few of the JavaScript variables to get it looking very nice. We plan on making some tweaks before rolling this out to our customers, but it looks like a very easy way to add order tracking to your website for very low cost.

In addition to using an input form on your website, you can send customers automated emails linking directly to the form on your website. For instance:

http://www.mysite.com/track.php?packageid=1Z1234567890123

Head over to TrackThePack’s website and sign up for an account for free and start testing. Grab the code below for an easy tracking form in PHP.

<?php if ( isset($_GET['packageid']) ) { ?>

 <script type="text/javascript">
 var ttp_number = "<?= $_GET['packageid']; ?>"; // Tracking number
 var ttp_width = "500"; // Change if needed, or comment out for default
 var ttp_height = "600"; // Change if needed, or comment out for default
 var ttp_m_width = "200"; // Change if needed, or comment out for default
 var ttp_m_height = "200"; // Change if needed, or comment out for default
 var ttp_key="YOURCODEHERE";(function(){document.write('<div id="ttp"></div>');s=document.createElement('script');s.type="text/javascript";s.src="http://trackthepack.com/javascript/embed.js?" + Math.random();setTimeout("document.getElementById('ttp').appendChild(s);",1);})()
 </script>

<?php } else { ?>

<p>Please enter your tracking number below:</p>

<form action="<?= $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method="get">
 <p><input type="packageid" name="packageid" value="" size=40></p>
 <p><input type="submit" value="Track Your Package"></p>
</form>

<?php } ?>

For those of you who are wondering “Why in the world would I want information on zip codes?”, targeting marketing campaigns by specific areas based on demographics is highly effective. For instance, you may be marketing a specific high-end service in a metropolitan area, so targeting to only the high-income zip codes will save you a lot of money and time.

There are multiple uses for zip code information. E-Commerce store owners can use the information to research potential credit card fraud issues, or match postal zip codes to cities.

20 sales / 1000 unique visitors = 0.02 = 2% conversion rate

Your store’s conversion rate is critical to your success. The average conversion rate for retail B2B e-commerce is 2-4%. I think this metric is actual skewed however, because many of the largest e-commerce businesses have conversion rates of over 10%.

I’d estimate the average e-commerce store with revenues under $1,000,000 has a conversion rate of less than 1%. And I’d bet that most of the owners don’t even know their conversion rate is that low because they either don’t understand what a conversion rate is or they don’t check it often and do anything about it.

Knowing your conversion rate is necessary if you plan on improving it. There are website analytics tools such as Google Analytics that can be configured to show your store’s conversion rate very easily. Use a tool and monitor your store’s conversion rate at least monthly, and especially whenever you make changes to your store’s layout or design.

Worldwide Brands has one of the largest directories of bulk wholesalers, light bulk wholesalers and drop shippers. They verify the information of all their suppliers rigorously. Unlike many “drop shipper” directories you can find in Google, Worldwide Brands is a legitimate company. They have been around for years (I have been a member for at least 3 years) and is the only product directory I recommend.

They have released a new video series on e-commerce and the current “recession” in the United States. Only two videos have been released so far, but there is some good content and will get you thinking and planning your e-commerce store. I’m sure this video series will be an excellent source of information and inspiration for new e-commerce store owners (or those thinking about starting one).

The video series won’t be up forever, so make sure to sign up and watch it. It’s totally free, and there’s no catch. If you like the information and want to start an e-commerce business (or another one) I highly recommend Worldwide Brands as a way of finding reputable companies to purchase product from.

I am not affiliated with Worldwide Brands in any way. I’m just a satisfied customer.

Probably not. None of us did… there are hundreds — thousands — of ideas for increasing sales, and it’s almost impossible to implement them all in time for the holiday season, even for large companies. We had a list broken down by priority, and as fast as I could check items off the list, another 2 ideas would be added.

We had a great holiday shopping season, but now that it’s almost over, I realize that I should have started much, much earlier. With more time, some more of my ideas could have materialized.

So, my advice as this holiday season comes to an end — Start planning for Holiday Season 2008 now. Make a timeline and start working towards it now… so when October/November rolls around next year, you’ll be ready!