Holiday Tips to Increase Sales

It's not too late to take steps to increase holiday sales. Below are a few tips to help boost your sales this holiday season.

Offer a variety of payment options - Many on-line shoppers have a preferred way of paying for on-line purchases. Potential customers will feel more comfortable shopping on your site if you accept a variety of different payment options. In addition to popular classics such as credit cards and PayPal, ShopSite version 8.1 adds the new Google Checkout payment method as an option you can offer your customers.
Offer Discounts - Shoppers love a deal. ShopSite has several ways to give your customers a deal:
- Coupons - ShopSite Pro merchants to offer specials on certain products, groups of products, or all products. You can offer specials to early shoppers or on those slow moving items.
- Rewards - Reward loyal customers and encourage new customers with rewards such as "buy 10 get 1 free" or "buy two pairs of shoes, get a free pair of socks". Rewards can be set up per-order, or over time for registered customers.
- Discount Schedule - Do you want to encourage customers to purchase more at your site? With ShopSite's discount calculation module, it's easy. Simply specify a given discount for various total purchase amounts and ShopSite does the rest for you.
- On Sale Feature - Highlights sale items. ShopSite Pro and Manager merchants can easily put products on sale, use a percentage or dollar discount, and indicate the original price versus the new sale price.
- Quantity Discounts - Highlights sale items. ShopSite Pro and Manager merchants can easily put products on sale, use a percentage or dollar discount, and indicate the original price versus the new sale price.
E-mail Your Customers - Past customers are an excellent source for additional sales. If you've used ShopSite's Opt-In option during check-out you will have a list of shoppers that have given you permission to contact them. Send them an e-mail/newsletter describing your specials, new products, or special promotions. You can even send them a digital coupon that they can click on to begin shopping at your store.
Get your order buttons on other sites - You can easily include order buttons in e-mail campaigns or on other sites using ShopSite's OrderAnywhere feature. Provide incentive for other sites to display your products using the Associates feature to pay them a percentage of every sale made from a referral.
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.
List items on eBay - eBay is a great way to increase awareness of your products, and your site. ShopSite 8.1 makes it easy to list products from your store as auctions on eBay with an integrated listing tool.

Merchant Tip

What are some ways I can optimize my website for search engines?

Solution
ShopSite creates static HTML pages for your store. Static pages are more easily indexed by search engines because the content is always there. However there are more things that you can do, such as include Meta tags on each of your pages. ShopSite allows you to specify the Title tag and Meta keyword tags for each of your pages. A new feature in ShopSite version 8.1 are Title tags and Meta tags for product more information pages. Many search engines use the META keywords and description as part of their indexing system. Effectively using your META tags can make a significant difference in your search engine ranking.

Some tips when creating meta tags are:

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.
With the Meta Description tag, make sure you accurately describe the content of your page while trying to entice visitors to click on your listing.
Include a few important key phrases in the beginnng of your meta description. These phrases should appear on your page frequently, be in your title tag, or be included in your meta keywords.
With Meta Keywords, you only want to list words that appear on your page, or in the title or meta description field.
Don't repeat any word more than three times in either the title, meta description or meta keywords tags, but you do want to list plurals.
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"

The "Support Queue"

Q: When I do a Google search that returns links to my website, some of the links are directly into my ShopSite shopping cart rather than to a store page or product page. What is causing this, and how can this be resolved?

A: These links are Add to Cart links for some of your products, or your View Cart link. Google has indexed your shopping cart screen because Google's web indexing "spider" followed your Add to Cart or View Cart links during their indexing of your site.

If this is happening to you, the way for you to tell Google's spider to stay away from certain directories or files on your site that you don't want indexed (i.e. your shopping cart) is via a robots.txt file that you can place in the root of your website that spiders check before they index your site. In this instance you would probably want to exclude spiders (e.g. Google) from following any links to the /cgi-bin/sc/ directory (or whatever directory that contains your ShopSite shopping cart cgi's). This directory does not normally include any valid HTML files that Google should be indexing, so it should not affect the normal Google links to HTML files on your site.

For more information on how to setup a robots.txt file for your site you can review one of the many sites on the internet about this subject, such as http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html.

Designer Template Tips

Q: How can I put a 'featured products' section on all of my pages created by ShopSite?

A: For this, many merchants like to use the subproduct feature to display similar items on the product more information pages. However, if you like to include a 'featured products' section, on all of your ShopSite pages, you can do this by creating an include file, and linking that include file within your custom templates.

To add an include file, you would go to Merchandising > Custom Templates > Add Include File. You can then enter all the code to diplay those products and provide links to those more information pages, or add to cart buttons so customers can purchase the items on any page. Once you have done that, you can then add the include file into your templates by using the following tag, [-- INCLUDE includefilename PROCESS --].

ShopSite In The News

ShopSite, Inc. Receives Business Awards
https://www.shopsite.com/news_06_business_awards.html
"For the fifth year in a row, ShopSite, Inc., was recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in Utah. ShopSite was presented the "Top 25 under 5" award by the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum. For the first time, ShopSite, Inc. has also earned the Utah 100 - Fastest Growth Companies award from the MountainWest Capital Network."

Industry Articles

Get Your Piece of the Holiday Pie
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com//article.php/3641071
"And Forrester's e-commerce diva Sucharita Mulpuru, along with her research team, offers valuable insight on how to address consumer concerns to maximize sales. These tips include, promotions, tie-ins, and institute a secure, easy-to-use, seamless payment system."

Knowledgebase Articles

The following article was recently added to the support knowledgebase:

S5519 Product database upload hangs/stops on linking phase.

Current Product Information

Most recent release of ShopSite:

Version 8.1.3.1 on Linux, Solaris/SPARC, Windows Server 2000 and 2003 and FreeBSD servers.

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

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