Well here we are, Thanksgiving. Is it me, or does Thanksgiving come around faster every year? Retailers everywhere are facing this holiday with a blend of excitement, anxiety, exhaustion, and adrenaline as they await the holiday shopping deluge. For the retailer this means final floor-sets, operations run-through such as Best Buys store rehearsals, and getting schedules in-place. Everyone’s business is different, but the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas will make or break most retailers. It will typically account for somewhere between 20-35% of sales for the year, and a much higher percent of margin and profit. This is a can’t miss time of year. For the eCommerce site it in many ways is a very similar set of activities, but obviously with a twist. Here is a run-down on many of the key things you can do right now to make sure you maximize your holiday sales.

Ten things to do right now:


1 - Create a gift category focused on the holidays - critical for the spear-fishing shopper [me!] to quickly find unique gifts. Here is a good example from eddiebauer.com with gifts for all their key categories. Notice also how the navigation highlights the gift category and how the overall site design reflects the holidays. When merchandising put yourself in a customers shoes, how can you help them find your products easily through good categorization. Are there various scenarios that you need to think about? [BTW - this is a golden rule, not just this time of year.]


2 - Does your homepage and navigation address key customer needs and outcomes? Key items featured, promotions clear, shipping deadlines clear? Customers short attention spans will amplify with the long lists and short time frames. Make sure they can quickly and easily find you info. Lands End are pros at this. A nice blend of holiday messaging, imagery, products, categories, and quick-links to key information.


3 - Search - Are your key products indexed on Google, Yahoo, and Live Search? If not, what can you do right now to fix that? What about Search marketing? Spend some money on your key products or categories. Depending on what you sell this might be a lot, so if you can’t rank top 5, it may not be worth it. What about your store name, can people find you? Are your competitors bidding on your name [if so , you can make them stop]? Here is a great example - need a lunch-lady action figure? Archie McPhee, Seattle legend for stocking stuffers makes sure they show up first in the results. Notice Amazon is doing some SEM on these long-tail terms, nice.


4 - Product Content - its not too late to make sure your key products have great product information. Make sure your customers can make well informed purchase decisions from your product detail page. Not only will this drive sales and conversions, it will reduce returns later. The gold-standard? Amazon. See their product page for the iPod Touch. Now is a also a good time for a once-again content audit to make sure you don’t having any missing images or other content you can take quick action on.


5 - Accessories - a good time to focus on cross sells and accessories. What is that something extra that will really round out the gift and say “I really thought about this” for your customers when they give that gift? Best Buy does a good job of serving up relevant accessories and service plans, though they can improve making this easier from the cart.


6 - Shipping options, deadlines, and gift-wrap policies - What ever they are, make sure they are really clear and that customers can find them easily. This includes from the homepage, product detail pages, checkout, and customer service & FAQ pages. I think the Lands End example above is a good one.


7 - Staff the phones and email contacts - Make sure you have coverage for the customer service issues that are going to come up as panicked customers limit their credit cards, your site has a blip [see #10], they got their sister’s address wrong, and so on. The urgency is going to ramp as the deadlines approach. If you have retail stores, make sure your associates know what to do if they get a call or someone comes in with a problem.


8 - Gift Cards - If you have them, market ‘em. These have really come into play as an increasingly popular alternative for the gift giver. And when those shipping deadlines hit, if you can crank these out, create a virtual representation, and get these into envelopes, offer free shipping and away you go.


9 - Email Marketing - Don’t forget to get those key email messages out this time of year. Its a good time of year to double down on your email frequency, communicating shipping deadlines, promotions, product specials, unique gift items, and those gift cards! And if you are segmenting, remember this is a time of year people cross category segments and are looking for gifts.


10 - Staffing for support and quick site updates - Make sure you have coverage on the site operations, site development, merchandising, and content functions. Have a schedule of when people are “on-call” and have all the various ways you need to reach them identified - personal email, IM, mobile phone, home phone, and the phone of Aunt Mildred’s where they are having Thanksgiving. Make sure your critical staff have their lap-tops with them when they are out. I have always just used a simple spreadsheet. A Google-doc may be a good way to go for this, allowing collaboration and a single source.


OK, but aren’t there a few things missing? YES!, but honestly it is too late to worry about these now. I will cover planning for next year in a week or so, when the turkey and sweet-potato hang-over wears off and I recover from the touch-football...

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Enjoy your friends and family, and give thanks for life, opportunity, and the inevitable challenges we all face - remember we can always get better.

Now, onto my pies.

- Brian

UGC in the Context of History
This is a really interesting video on User-Generated content recently posted to the TED site Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law. It gives me a historical perspective on the times we are living in. The natural laws of content are definitely changing. And, there are some hilarious bonus mash-up treats Lessing shows worth getting through some slow middle bits. Want inspiration? Visit TED Talks.

How to Hire a Design Agency: wow that's a lot of work
Forrester put out an interesting report on How to Hire an Interactive Design Agency [subscription required] by Kerry Bodine. It is a very in-depth review of how broken the process is and how hard it can be for someone to find the right fit. Wow, looks more complicated when I read this. But let’s face it, the skills and experience required to do this work well are in short supply. Finding the right agency can be very hard. Where do you start? This may be complicated by a lack of experience on the client side and in larger organizations - let’s face it - politics. Hear the words “website” or “site redesign” and watch the seagulls gather. And where there are lots of seagulls? Yep, lots of poop. In either case - clients large and small I believe a combination of a good solid methodology founded on real users along with strong project and account management can make a huge difference. Oh, and don’t forget, someone needs to develop and launch the design, something which can be very easily overlooked and if you want to design externally and design in house the transition can be very rocky.

Speaking of Forrester… Has anyone else noticed Forrester is starting to take the glove offs? This is a very good article on the Online Travel space by Harvey Manning. He’s calling all the players in online travel to task around the customer experience. He rightly points out that OLTA and supplier sites really just expose back-end tools and interfaces. No one is yet delivering a travel planning experience that improves on the kitchen table.

Basic Leadership Common Sense, but easy to forget
Good straightforward piece on leadership, The seven secrets of inspiring leaders, makes me reflect on some of the good and bad leaders I have had over the years. 1. Demonstrate enthusiasm. 2. Articulate a compelling course of action. 3. Sell the benefit. 4. Tell more stories. 5. Invite participation. 6. Reinforce an optimistic outlook. 7. Encourage potential. [via 37Signals blog Sunspots]

SEO check-up: say ahhhhh
SEO: The Website Health Check tool give you a quick shortcut to see if you have any major SEO issues. The site queries Google to grab pages you have indexed in Google, and looks for issues amongst the first 1,000 results. Not all the recommendations are easy to act on. This is a good site for SEO, but still can seem like witchcraft on some levels. Let us know if you need help.

Open Social 101
Want to learn more about what all this Open Social hoopla is about? Here is a good video from Ning about Open Social. I think there is room for Facebook to ride the wave, but this move will lead innovation elsewhere IMHO.

One of the first questions often asked by those thinking of starting a eCommerce site is “what products should I sell”? Here are some things to consider when putting together that first assortment.

1. Best Sellers

Pretty much a no-brainer I know, but it goes without saying that the first place to look in a catalog or store based business going online is what is already selling well in those channels. Your primary customers in your online channel are likely to be those who are shopping your other channels and they are likely to be after the same great product they love in the store or catalog.

For online only business this of coarse not something you will know as you get started. The best strategy is to try to experiment while keeping your inventory risk low, and then try to get into well selling product quickly. Always a good plan, but harder to do that it sounds.

2. Go Deep Instead of Wide

Another tip is to make sure you create categories of products with enough selection to make them shoppable. A category with only a few products is life a store fixture with only a few things on it. It works for Dolce & Gabbana or Coach, but few others.

Experimentation may require only a few products in a natural category. Think about creating gift, lifestyle, or occasion categories for these.

3. Access to Content about the Products

One of the biggest challenges in getting going is pulling together great content about your products. I am using the term content loosely, meaning images, copy, manuals, videos, and other attributes. Having great content is critical to a great customer experience and making your site successful. Are there vendors you work with who already have content they can share with you? Are there other sources of content? Some sites share their content openly. Be careful not to leverage content from other sites if it is clear they created it.

This content will also be important to help you with search engine optimization.

4. Photograph well

Maybe more of a general rule, but items that photograph well will do better online. This is something to consider in selecting an assortment overall, not just beginning.

5. Items over $20 or baskets over $100

This has as much to do with shipping costs as anything. Customers are going to be very reluctant to buy online if the shipping costs are a large percent of the overall transaction This does not necessarily apply to auctions or very unique products, but those are likely to be over $20 anyway.

Another way to think about it is if you can encourage multiple item sales to get basket size up. This can reduce the issues with low cost items, but this can be very hard to do.

6. Building cross-sells and up-sells

A way to encourage customers to browse and discover your great product is to have products that naturally sell in kits, bundles, or as accessories with each other. To get started this may need to be done manually, but over time you can automate these oruse a service to leverage customer sell through or navigation behavior on your site. But keep it simple to start.

7. Unique and differentiating

One of the most important things is going to be to develop a unique assortment is a unique brand and experience. Online it can be hard to rise above the noise, but having a unique set or product in a well designed experience is going to be easier to find in search, more relevant to a targeted audience, easier to engage loyalty with, and should see less price-based competition.

8. Measure, measure, measure

Keep experimenting and learning, while managing your inventory risk. Measure, measure, measure page views, search, conversation, sell-through, and click-through in your marketing. Trends will develop and you’ll see natural ways to expand and develop your assortment online. Even simple and free metrics tools like Google Analytics will do a long way toward helping you optimize your assortment. This is one of the great things about online retailing, use it.

Hopefully these help you put together your first assortments. We would love to hear what you have learned and what has worked or not for you.