An E-Commerce Holiday Checklist, Part 1

By Amy Africa

Here's a checklist of some of the most important things you should do with your website to get ready for the upcoming holiday season:

Merchandising
Promote in-stock messaging. Availability is a big issue for a lot of folks, especially around the holidays, so make sure your messaging provides product availability and delivery times near the pricing information. Use phrases like "In Stock!" or "Ships Today!" If you're already an availability messaging whiz, test rolling out deadline tickers that emphasize urgency and cause people to act fast. "Need it tomorrow? Order within the next 3 hours and 33 minutes and you'll get it by noon!" Amazon.com does a great job with this.

Also, increase the size of your action directives. Keep in mind, the bigger the buttons the better and the more the merrier. Ask for the order (or inquiry if you're a lead-generation business) in every view. Retailers design pages but consumers see views — there's a very big difference between the two.

Navigation and Internal Navigation
Site search is one of the most difficult things to master. Start by looking at the top 100 searches conducted on your site this year and make sure those words are better represented in your navigation.

It's important to remember that the order in which you present site search results is critical to your success. Take that list of 100 top searches and conduct them yourself, one by one. Review each result. The item you most want to sell should come up first, with the rest in descending priority.

Be sure to review your refinements as well. Due to the onslaught of guided navigation, many companies have gotten really sloppy with this. When people choose "sort by best-sellers" from your drop-down menu, for example, they should get your top-selling products, not a hodgepodge of garbage. Same goes with your new products. If someone is sorting by "new" and they get all your items from fall 2008, it diminishes your search credibility — one of the top two reasons why users abandon searches. Again, if you take your top 100 searches, you'll get a good indication of how you're measuring up in this area.

Take a quick look at your top navigational bar to make sure that the right items are being emphasized. If you're getting a lot of traffic in a particular area (e.g., clearance, sale, overstock), consider making it stand out more with either a bigger or different colored tab.

Navigation is one of the biggest determinants of your online success. Do a quick elimination of all the unnecessary/irrelevant items that have been added to your site (especially to your top and left-hand navigational bars) along the way. Online retailers tend to muck up their top header with all sorts of customer service elements when all they really want is orders. Don't list everything you sell and the kitchen sink in the left-hand navigation. Only half of those links ever get clicked on anyway. Do a quick cleanup.

Instigated Chat
Late summer or early fall is a great time to test the waters of instigated chat if you haven't done so already. Start on your shopping cart and lead form pages, then move on to search results and top exit pages. It may take a while for you to get live chat down pat, so keep playing with it until you get it to work. It will work, but it often takes time to perfect your technique.

Reviews
If you don't have a review program, now is the perfect time to get one. There are a lot of companies (from PowerReviews to Bazaarvoice) that handle reviews well. Remember, if you're going to commit to a review program, you need to work it. Develop solicitation emails and tools on your site to get your customers to rate and review their purchases. Using midis and catfishes — i.e., pop-up windows that appear in the middle of the screen or straight across the bottom of the screen, respectively — after a purchase can be really effective at capturing reviews.

Want to get the biggest bang for your buck out of user reviews? Organize them by importance. A lot of companies organize their reviews by date, and that's unfortunate. Reviews typically work a lot better when they're prioritized by significance. What's a good formula? Put one fantastic (e.g., five-star review) and one not-so-great (e.g., one-star review) review at the top. On another note, don't delete or hide negative reviews; respond to them. This is something a lot of companies forget. If it's your site, you can — and should — respond to as many reviews as is appropriate.

Check out On the Web in the September issue of Retail Online Integration, when I'll lay out more holiday e-commerce tips.

Amy Africa is chief imagination officer at e-commerce marketing solutions firm Eight by Eight. Reach Amy at amy@amyafrica.com.