Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Pinterest set to boom this Christmas

Last year, in December alone, customers spent nearly £8 billion purchasing products from an ecommerce store. As we at eSellution tell all of our clients on a regular basis, social media plays a vital role in helping your store achieve any long standing success. 

When planning out your Christmas social media attack, you must make sure that you include Pinterest in all of your plans. While many major bands use the social media site to create their own boards containing their own products, you shouldn't just think as a platform only being useful for companies with an established brand image. Whether your business is big or small, there are a number of large benefits to taking the time to establish yourself on Pinterest. 

Especially over Christmas, with many ecommerce stores all vying for the custom of people looking to purchase presents, food and other holiday necessities, standing out from the crowd and getting your products out there can often be difficult. Pinterest allows you to create your own personal boards containing images of all the products you have for sale. When a customer then searches for an image related to one of your products, it displays that product to the user. 

Pinterest is a fantastic way to begin increasing your brand image and product awareness, encouraging more people to visit your site and view the products on your page. While you may have a number of different marketing channels that you devote most of your time to, you need to incorporate Pinterest as for starters is is completely free to create a board and get it up there for people to see and secondly, it,s global exposure with over 10 million active users, meaning it can dramatically increase the levels of traffic your store will see over Christmas. 

Read our article "Pinterest better than Facebook" to see the statistics as to why you need to use this social media platform in order to achieve success this Christmas. With less than a month to go until Christmas, it is essential you begin marketing your store, brand and products across all marketing channels to ensure you get the exposure required to bring in the desired results. 

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Friday, 2 November 2012

The importance of retargeting this Christmas

When looking around for the best places to purchase their Christmas presents, many customers don't really know where to go, searching across a number of different ecommerce stores to compare what's on offer and at what price. 

This indecision presents a great opportunity for any online business, whether it's an ecommerce or eBay store, to try and direct the customer towards their site, enticing them to purchase their Christmas presents from their store. While many think retargeting is a way to bring back customers who have purchased from your store in order to turn them into repeat customers, it doesn't just stop there. 

As Christmas shoppers tend to browse online stores well before Christmas gets in full swing, if you sell products that themselves or their family members are interested in, they may have already looked through your site to see what you have on offer. 

Retargeting advertisements then begin to appear within this users Internet browser, advertising similar products that they previously purchased or viewed in your store. While their shopping experience may have been some months earlier, the retargeting adverts remind the user about your store, prompting them to return again to see what other offers you have. 

However, it isn't just enough having the advertisement appear in the browser, you need to create an advertisement that fits in with the current shopping trend. Obviously, as Christmas is approaching, any advertisements you create should be based around around this theme as well as highlighting any offers you are currently running. Also the style of the design should relate to your overall brand image. For example, the colour scheme should not only have Christmas connotations, but should also relate to whatever ecommerce or eBay template design you have on your store.  

Not only will these retargeting ads increase your brand exposure, they will also increase your traffic and hopefully your sales as customers who have previously purchased from you return to buy again and customers who looked at your products months ago also return but this time to make that first time purchase. 

Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html

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Tuesday, 23 October 2012

A detailed guide to increasing your Christmas sales


With Christmas fast approaching in just over two months, many ecommerce stores are now gearing towards getting ready for the festive period. However, with literally thousands of online stores in the UK alone, what things can you do to help get any many sales as you can this winter?


  • Change your website layout - You might want to think about changing your website design so that it is more geared towards a Winter theme. This will not only get visiting customers in the Christmas spirit, it will let them know that you have a Winter line available for them to purchase. While you may not have a substantial amount to spend in redesigning your ecommerce store, you could use some free ecommerce and eBay templates, such as those we provide here at eSellution. Just remember to change your design back to the old version once the festive period is over. However, if creating a whole new Christmas themed website is just too much effort and too costly, you can just simply look to create a Christmas themed landing page which gives users all the information about any special festive promotions and offers you are running, then redirecting them to your current store.

  • Free delivery - Offering customers free delivery is a great way to provide them with an incentive to purchase from your store. You could offer free delivery on all sales or on total orders over a particular amount, the decision is entirely up to you. Although this would cost you more in terms of having to pay for the shipping yourself, the extra orders the promotion would bring in would make it a profitable endeavour. 

  • Delivery guaranteed before Xmas - When a customer purchases a product from you over the Winter months, 99.9% of the time they are going to want it in time for Christmas Day. If you can't guarantee delivery before Christmas, the likelihood is that the customer isn't going to be interested in purchasing from you. When a customer visits your website, if you can offer guaranteed delivery before Christmas you should state it. You should also state what the cut off date is in terms of when a customer must make a purchase to guarantee delivery before Christmas.

  • Christmas discounts - Just like free delivery, offering discounts on specific products allows you to entice customers to your store. You may decide to add a discount to your most popular products or add it to products that have not sold so well in an attempt to boost sales. Shoppers love a bargain and no matter what products are part of this discounted offer, you will see a traffic and sales increase as a result. 

  • Festive advertisements - You know you now have your Christmas range in stock, customers visiting your store know it, but what about everyone else? To keep users up to date with what's going on in your store, you should create some banners, send out emails and post content on your social media pages to give people all the information they require to bring them to your store in order to make a purchase. 

  • Generous social media offers - Anyone who follows your social media pages are doing so to keep up with any new products, offers or discounts you are currently running. Look to use this to your advantage by rewarding people who are following you and also enticing new users to also follow you. You can do this by placing a discount code on to one of your social media pages which followers can then use when making a purchase from your store. This code could be a free novelty gift, a discount off particular products, free shipping or anything else you wish to add to a service through your ecommerce software. Thus encourages people to visit your site and make a purchase, as well as encouraging new users to follow your social media page in order to find out what this discount code is.

  • Returns Policy - While there is nothing wrong with the quality of your products on sale, as some of these products are bought for people as gifts, you may find that people who receive the gift simply don't like what they have been given or want to exchange it for something else. Having a good returns policy in place will allow people to exchange products for an alternative or get money back in terms of store credit. While this is an inconvenience to you, being flexible for your customers making their experience much more pleasurable and making it more likely that they will return again to make a purchase. 

  • Monitor competitors - With so many different stores all looking to increase their Christmas sales, you should look at what your competitors are doing in terms of what products they are offering and any promotions they might be running. Keeping an eye of what they are doing, allows you to alter your own store so that what you offer is more enticing that your rivals, ensuring that customers decide to purchase from you and not from them.

  • Get your stock levels right - As a busy Christmas period will bring about an increase in traffic and sales, the last thing you want to do is miss out on many of these sales because you haven't got your stock levels right. While for most of the year you should look to make sure you don't have too much left over stock, Christmas is the time of year where you can look to over stock slightly to ensure that you have enough products to complete all orders. If after Christmas has passed you have left over stock, you simply run a New Year sale to help get rid of the leftovers. 

  • Draft in help - More orders means more work for you in being able to process these orders and get them shipped out to customers in time for Christmas. If you run your business on your own, you may have difficulty managing this influx of orders. To help get through the busy period, you can look to draft in some friends or family to give you a helping hand to complete all of your orders and get them all sent out. 

  • Christmas orientated stock - Novelty Christmas stock allows you to take advantage of those hardcore Christmas buyers. This could include small stocking fillers as presents, wrapping paper, Christmas trees and many other items. Unlike stock control for other products in your store, you don't want to over stock these novelty items. While you can still sell these at a discounted price after Xmas, the price you would need to reduce them to in order to actually get the sales would provide very little profit on top of your costs.

  • Offer a gift wrapping service - As the majority of customers will be buying these items as presents, one of the packing services you could offer is a gift wrapping service. This would involve you wrapping it in stylish wrapping paper and possibly placing a bow or customer message on the gift. This is a little extra revenue stream for you as it will only take a short amount of time to gift wrap each product and you can charge an added fee for it.
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Monday, 22 October 2012

Online sellers must engage with Christmas shoppers earlier than usual

According eBay's new feature, the advertising barometer, which monitors the shopping trends of many users through the marketplace, most businesses who run an ecommerce store are not acting quick enough in order to take advantage of buyers looking to start their Christmas shopping early.

While these customers are still making a large proportion of their purchases online, many sellers are missing the opportunity to entice these shoppers to buy from their store through special offers, promotions and other marketing campaigns that are aimed specifically at the Christmas shopper. 

According to comments from Phoung Nguyen, UK head of eBay Advertising, placed on The Drum: "The Christmas browsing window is expanding; people are starting their Christmas earlier in the year, but leaving it later and later to make purchases."

Although customers may not be making the actual purchases until the latest possible opportunity, online stores who take advantage of this early consumer interest are the ones who are most likely going to see the greatest increase in sales over the Winter months. Essentially, this means you need to get your Christmas range, promotions and other offers out there for people to see at the earliest possible opportunity. However, this doesn't necessarily mean placing them all on your store for customers to browser in the Summer, it could simply mean sending out an email advertising your up and coming Winter range, placing information on your social media sites or developing banners and other advertising content for customers to view. 

The earlier you engage with these customers, the more likely you are going to see a huge increase not only in terms of the number of sales you make, but also how much you make from each sale. When a customer is planning their Christmas shopping schedule, they tend to focus on getting the main, larger presents early and then get the smaller gifts at a later date. Although a late marketing campaign will allow you to see an increase in sales through the smaller purchases, it's the larger items you should be looking to see as these will produce the best profit levels.

Although many people still prefer that Christmas Eve shopping spree, the days of running around shopping centres in a mad panic for those last minute Christmas gifts could soon be a thing of the past, as it is thought that by Christmas next year, shopping from the comfort of your own home through mobile commerce will soon make up over 40% of all ecommerce sales. 

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Friday, 19 October 2012

Ideas to increase your sales throughout Halloween

With many buyers and sellers alike gearing up in anticipation for a busy Christmas period, a lot of stores will notice a decline in sales up until he start of December as most people look to save money in order to purchase those much needed Xmas presents.

However, while some sales levels may be tailing off, you can look to take advantage of events running up to the winter months in order to give your sales a bit of a boost.  

With many adults looking to dress up for Halloween parties and children dressing up to go trick or treating, placing a new range of fancy dress clothing on your site might be a great way to give your ecommerce store a much needed boost. 

Like with all seasonal based items, you want to make sure that your order the right amount of stock for your business, you don't want to be left with a load of Halloween costumes that nobody wants anymore once November rolls around. If you have built up a strong social media presence, one way to ensure you are buying Halloween orientated stock that you know your customers will be interested in is to simply ask them. For example, you could place 10 different Halloween costumes on to your Facebook site and ask your customers to vote on which costumes they would purchase. You could then add the 5 most popular products to your store. That way you are adding products that you know at least a few people will purchase from you.  

However, it doesn't just have to be Halloween costumes you add to your store, you could add pumpkins, party decorations and anything else that people may use in order to celebrate the scariest night of the year. 

For our American friends or businesses who have a large American customer base, you can also look to include items related to the Thanksgiving holiday on November 22nd. This could include selling a range of table decorations, centrepieces and other pilgrim based items which would allow people to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday in style. 

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Monday, 1 October 2012

Increase your sales with Christmas frenzy planning

With less than 3 months to go until Christmas, many ecommerce stores are beginning to plan ahead for the anticipated rush of frenzied shoppers scurrying to buy all their gifts, food and other essentials before Christmas day. 

If you haven't already begun thinking about the busy festive period, maybe it's time you started looking at not only how you are going to handle this influx of traffic and sales in your online store, but also how you can take advantage of this busy shopping period to dramatically increase your sales.

The first thing you need to think about is your stock. If you don't have inventory, you aren't going to get sales and your going to miss out on a huge revenue stream that you should be taking advantage of. When buying your store's products from your suppliers, you should look to buy extra amounts to put aside for Christmas. Depending on how many sales each of your products achieve, you may decide that you will only need to do this for your most popular products. The benefit of this is that you not only ensure you will be able to fulfil all orders over Christmas, but you will also possibly be able to reduce your costs as buying your products all in one go will allow you to gain great discounts from your wholesaler. 

Now that you have the stock to fulfil all of your orders, you next need to look at how you are going to actually complete all of your orders in regards to processing, packing and shipping them out. If you are a large ecommerce brand this may not be too much of an issue as you have numerous employees, but if for example, you run your own eBay store, you may have difficulty completing this increased level of orders. One way to solve this would be to hire one or two people to work a few weeks over Christmas in order to help you get the orders completed and shipped out in time for the last postage deadline of December. However, a more cost effective method would be to draft in friends and family to give you a helping hand through this busy period. If they are hesitant to give you some friendly help, you could always ask for the help at your Christmas present for the year.

As I touched on in the last section, the postage deadline is something that all online businesses should be aware of. The last thing you want to do is complete an order, only for you to be unable to get it to the customer in time for Christmas. Being unable to get a product to the customer in time will probably not only result in that person cancelling the order missing out on an important sale, but it will most likely put them off from returning to your store again in order to make a future purchase. The last date for first class delivery from the Royal Mail is Thursday 20th December and Saturday 22nd December by special delivery. Although you will be aware of this, your customers most likely won't be, resulting in them wanting products to arrive at their homes right up until Christmas Eve. For this reason, you should look to not only place these postage dates on your website for all visiting customers to see, but also, if a customer makes a purchase beyond this postage deadline, you should make it clear to the customer that they will definitely not receive the product in time for Christmas. 

Now that you have covered the necessities for Christmas selling, you are ready to handle all increased sales demands. The next step is to look at things you can do to help take advantage of the festive period. The first thing you should be looking to do is run a number of different special offers in an attempt to entice customers to purchase their presents from your store as opposed to one of your competitors. The offers you choose to do are entirely up to you. You may decide to offer a discount on particular products or you may decide to offer free shipping on transactions over a certain amount. Whatever promotion you decide to do, you should advertise this across forums, social media, emails and all other marketing channels as they are a great way to take advantage of this busy shopping period. 

Another idea could be to add a range of Christmas products to your store. This item range could consist of Christmas trees, stockings, wrapping paper and various other festive items that may interest customers. However, when buying this stock you should remember that these items will only be popular during the winter months. Buying too much stock will leave you with left over stock in the New Year that no one will be interested in buying from you, unless it's for a significantly reduced price. 

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Tuesday, 11 September 2012

Royal Mail looking to help businesses through the Christmas rush

As all ecommerce sellers gear up for a busy Christmas period, organising your deliveries so that they reach your customers on the required day can often be difficult. To help with this busy period, Royal Mail have released their Christmas Planning Guide, which provides online stores with all the information they will need when it comes to delivering items with the company.

The website provides online sellers with all the information they may require such as all the dates for late postage both in the UK and International, highlighting different days, depending on the shipping method. This will allow you to plan ahead to ensure that all of your products are shipped out to customers before the delivery deadline passes. The last thing you want is to have a customer purchase a product as a Christmas present, only for you to be unable to deliver it to them by Christmas. This will most likely result in the order being cancelled and the person not using your ecommerce store in the future. 

Royal Mail have also promised on their site that their "Delivery to a neighbour" programme will be up and running nationally in time for the festive period. The idea behind this is to make their services more convenient for all involved by allowing items that are too big for a letterbox to be left with a neighbour, should the customer not be in to receive the package. 

For those shipping products to International customers, Royal Mail offers two delivery methods; "Airsure" which is a fully tracked service delivering to 30 different countries and "International Signed For" which is an International signature based service. 

The site also boasts a number of different statistics and tips give you information regarding ecommerce selling during Christmas 2011. To try and quash many fears both customers and sellers have about their products not arriving on time or at all due to the heavy workload faced by delivery companies, Royal Mail have announced that they will be employing 22,000 extra workers to help with the increased traffic during the Christmas period. While you may not begin planning for the Christmas rush just yet, you should have this page bookmarked in your browser for when you need it. 

Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html

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