The holiday cybershopping season is just beginning, but can your business handle the expected on-line rush?
The truth is, if you're only now considering whether your website can accommodate a major spike in gift-seeking e-commerce, then it's already too late to fix any major problems. You should have done something months ago.
Still, there are a few things you can do now and it just might be enough to get your on-line small business successfully through the seasonal buying frenzy. That's assuming you have a retail website operating relatively smoothly and the IT infrastructure to support it.
Laura Betterly, president and chief executive officer of on-line marketers In Touch Media Group Inc., forecasts that North American holiday on-line sales this season will total more than $32-billion (U.S.). She offers a few guiding principles and basic ideas on how a business might improve its on-line success this Christmas.
Your Web property has to be friendly, she says. Your on-line shopping cart should be easy to find and should make the shopping experience painless. And don't overwhelm your on-line customers.
"You don't want to put everything about your whole business and 100,000 items on the front page," Ms. Betterly says. "Have separate pages. If you give people too many choices, they'll choose nothing, so push your No. 1 item."
If you're guiding customers to a traditional brick-and-mortar retail outlet, then make sure the messages you post on your website contain a call to action, telling people things like how to make a purchase and where to find you.
"You'd be surprised how many websites are missing that," she says. "You want to make sure you convey what you are and what you're going to do for them. It's basic, but some people just don't see it."
Another item to check for is potential broken links within your website that don't make the connection for customers. The best way to test this is to drive customers to your website through a search engine tool like Google Adworks, and then wait. If nobody contacts you, it's probably a strong indication that you have a problem, Ms. Betterly says.
Speed is also an important consideration. Tom Harpointner, CEO of e-commerce consultant AIS Media Inc. in Atlanta, says it's important to ensure your site can quickly serve up Web pages. Most people won't wait longer than seven seconds before heading elsewhere on-line.
"The faster, the better," he says, adding that businesses that take the time to build a compelling website will often make the mistake of looking to the cheapest Web hosting company, whose network communication services simply don't cut it. "If you're visiting a site and if the experience is slow and painstaking . . . people become impatient. They leave."
Another basic element to add to your website's holiday shopping list is a message that assures customers the items they purchase from you will arrive by Christmas if ordered by a specific date. It's a simple but important notice.
Investigate by performing Web searches for the types of products you sell and examine how others market the same items. Among other things, this gives you a good sense of what people are expecting to pay for your product, Ms. Betterly says. Look at your competitors to see what they're doing that might also work for you.
Gather the customer e-mail addresses you've been collecting throughout the year, then consider sending out a newsletter. But be sure that it's not a blatant advertisement. A newsletter of product tips or holiday buying ideas and suggestions could be highly effective in driving traffic to your site.
"You're trying to build friendly relationships," Ms. Betterly says, explaining the goal of an on-line newsletter campaign. She also suggests talking about news of upcoming specials and deals. Highlight a good customer experience. Send out discount coupons.
Use the business e-mail lists you've been compiling throughout the year, rather than purchasing someone else's.
"Unless it's a specialized list, I would not go with any kind of huge bulk e-mail," Ms. Betterly says. "Lists should be compiled from those who've asked you for more information in the past -- your customers. Don't abuse it. Don't send out 3,000 e-mails a day. You'll get them angry."
And don't be too quick to change things on your site. The life of a "click" is about eight weeks, Ms. Betterly says. So consider that if a customer visits your website and is interested in one of your products, they probably won't buy right away. Many on-line shoppers bookmark a product page and come back to it later. If you're too quick to change that page, then you might miss out on a sale.
Remember, there's urgency. It's November after all and you've got to start doing these things now. You're under the gun and you probably should have been thinking about these sorts of things back in August. So get moving.
Start thinking about holiday season 2007 as soon as Christmas 2006 is done. Mark Voris, CEO of e-commerce company Intelimind LLC in Chicago, says the continuing and active management of systems and networks is the key to ensuring your on-line business can support large spikes in on-line activity.
"I'm a big advocate of monthly system audits of hard-drive space and continual assessments of average processor speed," Mr. Voris says. "You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been."
He recommends continually logging performance issues and problems, plus baseline assessments of how systems perform. It's key to forecasting the likely IT systems and network capacity you'll need in the future and one way to develop a predictive on-line performance model.
It's about trying to forecast what's needed to support growth and to eliminate unexpected on-line IT failure, Mr. Voris says. There are often early signals.
"Your history tells you how your systems perform and that's important," Mr. Voris says. "Computers are like cars. When they're about to fail, cars start acting in certain ways. IT systems are the same. You can see that through the audits and history documentation of your systems."
Dan McLean is editor-in-chief
of publisher ITWorldCanada.com
