‘Twas A Month Before e-Christmas - Let’s Not Repeat Last Year’s Mistakes

With an unsteady stock market, loss of funding, and a general pessimistic air pervading the New Economy, what’s an e-tailer facing the holiday shopping season to do? Forge ahead, I say!! After all, in retailing the holiday season can make or break you, so you’ve at least got a 50% chance of success!

In all sincerity, e-tailers need to take Christmas 2000 as seriously as Christmas ’99, though hopefully with some more well laid plans. Christmas ’99 disaster stories were highly publicized, but from failure come opportunity! Lessons learned should help structure this year’s playbook, which should include promotional strategies as well as fulfillment, shipment, and customer service strategies. Let’s review.

Site Functionality

We already know the statistics for abandoned shopping carts are pretty staggering. As recently as July 2000, research was showing that almost 4 times as many online transactions are abandoned than are completed and that decent customer service could have rescued 7.8 percent of those abandoned purchases and made $6.1 billion in revenue for Internet retailers (source: Datamonitor).

If you haven’t put your site through its paces and fine-tuned it lately, you ought to. Use objective outsiders to make sure your site is as user-friendly as possible. Make any changes - even minor ones - that can help the user more easily complete their transactional experience.

Customer Service Tools

Most studies now cite some kind of inadequate web site customer service as a sore spot for online consumers. Online customer service features can range from comprehensive FAQ tools to some sort of live help in the form of chat or voice assistance. The larger the web site, the more likely one of these sophisticated tools merits implementation.

Many online customer service tools are not inexpensive, but with the influx of more players into this market, the more competitive the price tag has become and the more affordable these tools for smaller volume sites. There’s still time to shop around and get a solution integrated into your site. Companies like eAssist, eShare, Lipstream, HumanClick, and StartCall are a few to consider.

Planning for the Best of Circumstances

So, let’s say that you’ve managed to get the customer through the online ordering process (hooray!). Now, it’s only fair for their expectation to be that they’ll receive their goods in time for the holiday season. How you’ve planned your order-through-delivery process is going to determine how well your customer’s expectations are met.

If you haven’t planned for this yet, your goose might be literally cooked. Far too many sites only delivered failed promises last year, and it’s likely to have hurt the online consumer. They’re more leery this year and are either going to shop at sites at which they’ve already had a positive, reliable experience, or they’re just going to shop off-line, where at least they’ll be guaranteed to get their merchandise in time for Christmas.

If you want to checklist your procedures, here are a few things you ought to be in the midst of doing:

• beefing up your inventory (or your site’s ability to swiftly remove out-of-stock items from display on-site) to cover Christmas orders;
• training telephone customer service operators how to answer commonly asked seasonal shopping questions like, “Do you have this item in stock?”, “How long will it take for me to get my order?”, “Can I change the shipping address?” and “I just tried to place an order but my computer froze up. Can you see it in your system?”
• practicing order fulfillment procedures with your in-house staff. You might also consider hiring and training temporary staff now so they’re up-to-speed by Christmas shopping time;
• firming up your relationships with your shipping providers. Think of worst-case scenarios and see how they’d be willing to work with you to make delivery a reality for your customers;
• making provisions for online gift certificates if you don’t already offer them. Gift certificates are great for folks who aren’t sure of preferences or sizes. Why miss a sales opportunity just because you don’t offer this simple (and virtually no-cost!) option?

Return Policies

This section is important enough to be mentioned on its own. I can’t emphasize enough that it’s imperative to have a solid, flexible return policy in place. This is going to make the difference between customers shopping at your site versus someone else’s.

At the very least, your site should have a simple return-and-credit policy. But this doesn’t help the person who gets a gift and wants to exchange it for something else, so having an exchange policy is important, too. Returns should be as easy as possible - like calling a telephone number to arrange pick-up or having a return address to which to send the item. Decide ahead of time if your company is willing to absorb the cost of return shipping and well as re-shipping exchanged merchandise. It’s expensive, but if it reduces the hassles for your shoppers, they’re going to be more inclined to continue to spend their hard-earned money with you.

If you happen to have an off-line presence as well as an e-store, allowing returns there, too, gives you an edge.

Advertise

If you haven’t yet planned your advertise buys, don’t despair! Though it’s too late to make certain media buys, there are still some to be had, especially online ones. The slump in the market has softened ad spending and increased available inventory on many sites, so there are bargains to be had. If you can plan some ad strategy and make some buys before Thanksgiving, you can still get the benefit of good, timely promotion.

If you’ve never advertised online before and want a quick, one-stop approach, you may want to consider going through an ad network like Engage, 24/7 Media, or Advertising.com to place your buy. If you have a sense of what you’re doing, contact your favorite, most responsive sites and see what they can ante-up. Or, register to make mixed media buys on “ad exchanges” like AdOutlet.com or OneMediaPlace.

Follow-Up, But Don’t Abuse It

Once the Christmas season is over, if you’re brave, put a follow-up system in place that allows you to make contact with your customer post-purchase. This email should not try to sell anything; rather, it should simply be an opportunity for your customer to give you honest feedback about their experience. As a way to build a more lasting relationship with them, you can also direct people to a web page where they can get more information or register with you for future offers (and, yes! At this point, you can sell to them!).

If the customer responds negatively, have a system in place to handle their complaint. Surely, a return email from a person (rather than an auto-responder) can do wonders, but it doesn’t hurt to try to squelch their dissatisfaction with a return offer of a discount or something free. For customers who don’t reply at all, take it as a sign that they do not want to be bothered. DO NOT continue to email them, because you’ll be viewed as an email abuser at that point. You might not only lose them as a customer, but they are also likely to complain to friends and family about your poor marketing practices.

So make what little time you have between now and Christmas really count. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Christmas 2000 Online will bring about more Christmas good cheer than Christmas 1999 did and we’ll all be in business for another year to come.

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