Tips to Increase Holiday Sales
With the holidays about to begin here are some tips to increase store sales:
- Discounts, Discounts, Discounts! - Shoppers love a deal. ShopSite has several ways to give your customers a deal:
- 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 - allow ShopSite Pro merchants to offer the volume purchaser a better price for buying more product.
- Digital Coupons - enable 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.
- Order Discounts - let ShopSite Pro merchants offer savings to shoppers if their total order is over a certain amount.
- 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 - with ShopSite's OrderAnwhere feature you can easily create order buttons for e-mail campaigns or to place on other sites. With the Associates feature you can incent other sites to send shoppers your way by paying them a percentage of every sale made from a referral.
Merchant Tip
The following was posted on the ShopSite Newsgroup:
"We are thinking of turning on the automatic credit card processing features. However, what do we do if there is somthing that needs to be changed on the order? For example a product is out of stock, or the customer did not select the correct sales tax, or they call us and ask us to change the shipping to next day, etc."
Solution
We do the preauthorization in ShopSite and capture the final funds in our payment gateway's virtual terminal. For example, if you are using Authorizenet do a Group Capture, Authorizenet places a box beside of each order amount. If the final amount is less than that authorized, you just input the amount that you need captured in the box. If the final amount is more than that authorized, we use the Virtual Terminal and capture the difference. Most payment gateways will have similar functionality.
-Norman 1 Ocean Boulevard
Submit a Tip
Do you have a marketing or ShopSite tip you'd like to share with other merchants? If so, submit it to
The "Support Queue"
Q: Is there a way ShopSite Pro can automatically sort product pages by date or some other arbitrary sorting scheme?
A: Yes, you could set the Page Arrangement feature to sort by Product Description, then at the very beginning of all Product Descriptions add your sorting info in an HTML comment tag. For example if you wanted to sort on date:
<!-- 2003-04-01 --> <!-- 2001-12-25 --> etc.
Then depending on the sort order, Descending or Ascending, they would get newest products first or last.
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ShopSite In The News
ShopSite, Inc. Receives Second "Top 25 Under 5" Award
ShopSite, Inc. again recognized as one of Utah's fastest growing companies. Read the press release here.
Industry Articles
Personalize This
http://ecommerce.internet.com/news/news/article/0,,10375_3092061,00.html
"A new report from Jupiter Research, a division of Jupitermedia Corp., is now confirming what many businesses have already realized: online personalization just isn't cost-effective."
Arrival Time and Response Rate Decline
http://www.clickz.com/em_mkt/em_mkt/article.php/2246501
"There's more involved in timing e-mail than numbers. The recipient's mindset plays a key role. At 9 a.m., she's slogging through a mountain of e-mail, searching for important messages so she can get down to work -- not exactly the right environment for your message. You want to reach people when they're relaxed and unhurried, not uptight and annoyed."
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Knowledgebase Articles
The following articles were recently added to the support knowledgebase.
S5486: LinkPoint email regarding new Discover Card CID requirements
http://support.shopsite.com/kbase/view_answer.php?questionID=S5486
S5485: setting up 'hosts' file to access new server via domain name before DNS changes
http://support.shopsite.com/kbase/view_answer.php?questionID=S5485
Current Product Information
Most recent release of ShopSite:
- 6.3 (On Linux, Solaris/SPARC, Windows 2000, Irix, FreeBSD or BSDI servers)
To upgrade your ShopSite store, contact your authorized reseller hosting partner.
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