Selling Online #11 : Holiday Time

In this, the final column for 2006, I thought that I would go out with something relevant for the upcoming holiday season. I’m going to talk about the importance of promotions on your web site, and how they can be used to increase conversions (turning a browser into a buyer). Namely, I’ll touch on the promotion and merchandising of gift friendly products and on things to think about when considering offering free shipping as a promotion.

One of the leading experts in the field of e-commerce merchandising is Lauren Freedman of the e-tailing group. In a follow up to her excellent (and free) report on driving conversion (download the report) she performed a survey of 250 etailers and asked them to rate the effectiveness of 44 different merchandising techniques. Of the top 10 techniques, the number one result was seasonal promotions. Two other promotional items were also in the top ten: sales or specials was 4th, and free shipping was 6th.

In this column, I’m going to focus on holiday promotion and merchandising, and then take a look at free shipping. Sales and specials deserve and entire column on the best ways to develop, execute, and promote e-commerce discount campaigns.

Now’s a great time to start merchandising your site to make the most of the upcoming holiday gift-giving season. While it might be obvious if you sell snowmobiles or ATV’s that the winter is an excellent sales opportunity, it might not be so obvious about how a non-winter market product dealer (i.e. a PWC dealer in Maine in December) can make the holidays a big deal. First and foremost, remember that with your website, you’re not limited to local markets. Think globally, or at least nationwide! Just because it’s 40 below and snowing where you are, it’s sunny and 70 in L.A.!

Second, and with particular emphasis with holiday gift giving in mind, make sure that your site is loaded up with powersports branded apparel, lifestyle accessories, and other kinds of do-dads. It’s a great time to be selling logo apparel and so forth to the husbands, wives, and kids of the actual rider in their lives as they rack their brains for what to stick under the tree or drop in the stocking.

Make sure you merchandise your home page with generally attractive products so that a person who does not have in-depth knowledge of your particular niche of powersports will be guided to find a nice present for their loved one. Pay particular attention to having your cross-sells and up-sell items merchandised well. When they click on that red Honda hoodie, make sure that they are also presented with other, general Honda enthusiast merchandise (models, toys, clocks, posters, etc.). Most of these shoppers may not know much about motorcycles, but they know their son likes and rides a Honda. Help them find a bunch of cool Honda stuff on your site.

I know you get this type of sales challenge several times a day leading up to the holidays in your physical showroom. Imagine that same conversation going on in the shopper’s mind when they happen across your site after doing a web search for “Motorcycle gifts.” Make it easy and obvious to the casual shopper what’s cool. And once they are looking at that selection of “cool” things, make sure you are presenting them with a logical selection of other really cool things.

If you do this properly, you will be amazed at how much some of these customers are going to buy! Once they get in a well merchandised store, they are going to keep finding more and more “cool” stuff not only for the person they came there looking for, but their husband, brother, and maybe even themselves!

Next up is free shipping. Free shipping can be a VERY sharp two edged sword. And you may find that you are holding the edges and swinging the handle around if you are not careful. Remember that you can’t make up a loss on every sale by increasing the volume! But like all types of sales and discounts, it’s the bigger picture that you need to keep in focus when developing your free shipping programs.

Free shipping has proven over the years to be an amazingly powerful tool in the e-commerce toolbox when it comes to getting products in a person’s basket through the checkout process. Large e-commerce players actually have entire staffs devoted to the research and development of when and how to activate free shipping so that they can retain, and in most cases increase the Average Order Value (AOV). You may have to rely on a little more gut and back-of-the-envelope analysis. This is even truer if you are new to selling online because you don’t have the type of supporting data on things like AOV and conversion ratios at various price points that can help you make a detailed analysis.

As a first pass, take a look at your seasonal AOV, and try to offer free shipping at a dollar point above that AOV in hopes that you can get the shopper to add another item or two to their cart to get the free shipping. Also make sure that your website’s system has a way of alerting the customer when they are close to the free shipping threshold. Have your site say, “Hey, if you buy just $5.00 more, we’ll ship your whole order for free!”

Using these types of tactics successfully you should see an increase in conversion and AOV, and if you did a good job of working with the numbers, you should see a positive increase in your revenue AND profit this holiday shopping season.

Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online