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December 6, 2018 - 35 Comments
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, but there are still plenty of holiday shoppers looking for the perfect gift. With many wanting their purchases by December 25th, it’s critical for you to plan around your carrier’s holiday shipping deadlines and set expectations with shoppers.
To help, we created this chart outlining the important send-by dates recommended by USPS for Christmas delivery.
October 20, 2018 - 12 Comments
Lots of posts about eCommerce over the holidays encourage you to get started early. We’ve published a number of these ourselves!
But the good news is it’s never too late to set up a sale, discount, or deal in your store. As long as the holidays are still happening, you can take a few minutes to get in on the holiday action.
Try these last-minute holiday sale ideas now, next month, or the next time a holiday rolls around.
October 19, 2018 - 6 Comments
Once the holidays are over, you can breathe a long sigh of relief. Things can finally settle down and go back to normal, right?
Well… not exactly. With projected record-setting holiday sales come record-breaking returns in January and February. This past year, UPS alone expected to process 6 million returns in the week after Christmas.
After the holidays end, your top priority needs to be satisfying the customers who have ill-fitting, unsuitable, or defective merchandise that they’d like to send back to you. An estimated 25 to 30 percent of online purchases are sent back! This means you have to have a plan to handle post-holiday returns — and handle them so well that these gift recipients turn into bonafide customers.
Let’s take a look at how you can handle these returns and exchanges smoothly. We’ll start with what you can do now, before the season starts, to get your website ready. Then we’ll look at how to properly handle returns and unhappy giftees.
Ready? Let’s get a move on.
October 14, 2018 - 11 Comments
Can you smell gingerbread, cinnamon, and pine? Or fruity fragrance of mulled wine?
While it might be a little early for these Christmas scents, the holiday shopping season in retail is already underway with eager shoppers getting started as early as September.
Last year’s online sales over the holidays hit a new record: In 2017, customers spent $108 billion online during the holiday season, which was 14.7% more than in 2016.
If you’re running an online store, here are some tips on how to make the most of increased holiday traffic with live chat.
October 12, 2018 - 5 Comments
Another holiday season is right around the corner, and we know that it can be easy to start feeling a bit overwhelmed with all of the things you’ll need to do in the coming months. (Plan festive meals! Wrap gifts! Make a resolution! Keep your resolution!)
But if you sell stuff online—and you’ve connected your WooCommerce store to Mailchimp—you can rest easy knowing that you’ve already got the tools you need to sync your customer data, send targeted campaigns, and sell more stuff all season long.
Today, we’re going to share four tips that will help you take advantage of all these powerful tools and make the most of your marketing throughout this holiday season. Let’s get right to it!
October 12, 2018 - 13 Comments
The sound that notifies that a customer has placed an order at your online store, is the sound that every store owner wishes to hear more and more. And with the holiday season already in, this is nonetheless most profitable (and busiest) quarter of the year for everyone who dabbles in online retail and eCommerce.
Be it the store owners or marketers dabbling in eCommerce, the preparations for holiday season begins early. Right from stocking the inventory to updating the products in store to setting lucrative offers to lure newcomers; and appreciating existing customers to making sure they are reaching out to the correct audience. This is done almost a month early to accommodate the huge inflow of visitors and shoppers.
With email marketing boasting of 81% customer acquisition capability compared to other marketing channels, it is undeniably the best way to harness this holiday season – to reach your audience while taking care to boost your overall ROI. Yet holiday email marketing is altogether a different ball game compared to email marketing rest of the year.
October 9, 2018 - 10 Comments
There are plenty of things you can do to bump up your earning potential, but quite a few of them involve adding new products or bringing in more inventory. What we’re going to look at today will allow you to earn more with simple “packaging” changes to the products you already have.
Let’s dive into how you can set up and promote product bundles this holiday season, and a few ways that you can ensure they help you make more money.
October 6, 2018 - 8 Comments
If you have an online shop, it’s time to start thinking about the holiday season. It’s never early enough to start planning for the most wonderful time of the year, right?
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming up soon. While ranking in Google isn’t something you can do overnight, with a few weeks still to go there is time enough to make some search engine optimization (SEO) related improvements and strategic changes.
Let’s explore what you can do right now when it comes to SEO tips for the holidays, namely: setting up new pages and renewing old ones.
October 5, 2018 - 10 Comments
Over busy seasons when attention spans are limited and competition is rife, smart optimization of your store’s landing pages is a way to give your store an edge.
If a shopper has two seconds to choose between a store with a busy homepage and another with a targeted page that speaks exactly to their needs, well, that single page might make all the difference.
In this post, we’ll take a look at what landing pages are, how to optimize them for holiday shoppers, and explore a few new pages you might need to convert more of those clicks into solid sales.
September 30, 2018 - 13 Comments
As you head into the holiday season, it’s common to think big picture – as in the big things you’re going to do to drive traffic, increase sales, and keep your customers happy – but it’s also critical to think about some little things that might make a big difference.
Including your WooCommerce store’s settings.
It’s worth checking on these settings, from your store emails to your low stock threshold to the text in your site-wide notice, before things get really busy.
So, here are some important WooCommerce settings to review before the holidays begin.
September 29, 2018 - 6 Comments
As the holiday season approaches, how are you ensuring your checkout process is optimized so you’re bringing in the most sales? After all, you can easily lose customers at multiple points even when they’ve added an item to their shopping cart. To best appreciate this, let’s take a look at the stages of a checkout process and where you can lose customers.
You could be losing almost half of your customers either due to a confusing checkout experience, a lengthy checkout, or payment security concerns! Imagine how your sales can improve simply by fixing those three checkout pain points. In this post, we’ll uncover the 5 key ways you can help boost holiday sales by improving your checkout process:
September 23, 2018 - 3 Comments
Do you ever watch old Charlie Chaplin movies? Every time things are going great, the poor guy gets knocked down. (Often literally.)
Watching those movies reminds me of the January sales tax “perfect storm.” In Q4 everything is gravy – you’re making sales, gaining new loyal customers, and watching the dollar bills pile up. Then January rolls around and you have a sales tax filing due. Suddenly all those sales translate into exponentially more work as you attempt to fill in your tax forms.
If you’ve never filed a sale tax return before, here’s a sneak peek of what you might find:
If you’re completing this form, you’re required to figure out where each of your sales was made and how much sales tax you collected from your customers. It can be a long, intimidating process — and pretty annoying if you’re riding high from collecting those Q4 profits.
Here’s how you can prepare now so the post-holiday sales tax perfect storm doesn’t catch you unaware.
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