Tips to Increase Holiday Sales

It's that time of year when many merchants make a significant amount of their yearly sales, so once again we will highlight some of the ShopSite features merchants can use to increase their orders. We won't repeat the ideas from last year but they are still valid so click here to read about using coupons and other promotion features.

Free Shipping - is always an attention grabber and shoppers love to get something for free. ShopSite v7.0 added a free shipping feature to manager and pro stores. You can easily specify a minimum dollar amount that needs to be spent before free shipping goes into effect. You can also limit the free shipping to certain geographical areas.
Special Holiday Discounts - Offer an automatic limited time discount to your frequent shoppers or to your infrequent shoppers. Coupons can automatically be assigned to shoppers that sign-in to your store using ShopSite Pro's customer registration feature. Create a Premium shoppers group or an Infrequent shoppers group and assign the appropriate shoppers and coupon to the group. Then e-mail those shoppers and let them know of your promotion. Use ShopSite's opt-in feature and Customer Registration e-mail address download option to contact your shoppers.
Dress up your site - Place holiday images on your site to get shoppers in the mood. With ShopSite you can easily add an image to any page or product. If you want to go the whole nine yards, use ShopSite custom templates to have everything from your store front to the shopping cart pages reflect holiday colors and theme.
Promote on your receipts - Use your e-mail receipts to entice your shoppers to come back. Mention any promotions, add a link to a coupon for return customers, use v7.0's HTML e-mail function to embed holiday images and products that you are trying to move.

Merchant Tip

"I've read that meta tags are important for search engine rankings. What are some guidelines? "

Solution
ShopSite Pro and Manager allow the merchant to easily add meta keywords and meta descriptions to the store's web pages. These meta tags are not displayed to shoppers but are used by search engines when they index your site. Keep the following suggestions in mind when creating meta tags.

Each web page should have a different title, meta description and meta keywords. The information should be appropriate to the particular page, not generic to the site.
Use your main keywords in the page title, meta description and meta keywords tag. Put your most important keywords first.
Use the same keywords in the first few lines of text immediately following the tag, naturally sprinkled throughout the content and also at the foot of the page if possible.
Don't repeat any word more than three times in either the title, meta description or meta keywords tags.
Don't include a keyword in the meta keywords tag that is not present somewhere in the visible page content.
Using spaces instead of commas to separate keywords in the meta keywords tag ensures search engines can group words to exactly match search phrases. e.g. some engines might not match for 'submit url' if your tag says "url submit,url submission"
With keywords, less is more. The fewer the words in your title, meta description and meta keywords tags, the more relevancy points a search engine will give each (e.g. 100% divided by 20 words gives 5% relevancy points for each word. 100% divided by 5 words gives a 20% relevancy for each).

-Kyle http://www.merchantcorner.com/

The "Support Queue"

Q: When attempting to accept the shopper's credit card my payment gateway no longer works?

A: A payment gateway that suddenly stops working usually occurs because a configuration setting was changed by the merchant using their interface to the gateway server. For example, if you change your gateway password you also need to let ShopSite know what the password is. When trying to troubleshoot a gateway problem turn on the detailed error messages in ShopSite. Go to Commerce Setup -> Payment -> Configure Processor and select the Display Error Details box. Now attempt to place an order and note the detailed error message at the bottom of the screen. If you see something like authorization failed then it means that information to login to the gateway was rejected and you should verify the login ID and Password with your gateway.

ShopSite In The News

Create and Manage Your Store with ShopSite
"ShopSite continues to make a name for itself as a powerful e-commerce solution offering flexibility and real room to grow." Read the full E-commerce-Guide article here: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/building/article.php/10362_3337111_1.

Industry Articles

A search engine nightmare: 12,000 SKUs, but only 17 pages show up at Google

http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=11733

"Since all our product pages are dynamically generated, that means a page doesn't exist until a user asks for it,” Miller adds--the reason that Google`s spider couldn`t find them and had indexed little more than Northern Tool's homepage."
Note: ShopSite's pages are all search engine-friendly static pages. Besides being search engine-friendly static pages are much faster than dynamically generated pages.

Knowledgebase Articles

The following article was recently added to the support knowledgebase.

S5490: Version 7.0.5 Maintenance Release
http://support.shopsite.com/kbase/view_answer.php?questionID=S5490

Current Product Information

Most recent release of ShopSite:

7.0.5 (On Linux, Solaris/SPARC, Windows 2000 and 2003, Irix, FreeBSD or BSDI servers)

To upgrade your ShopSite store, contact your authorized reseller hosting partner.

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