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11/26/2004: "It Will be a Hot Season for Online Sales --- Will YOU Get Your Share?"

People love to buy online. There are lots of reasons for that. But one is that it's convenient. Another is it saves time and very often it saves money.

Online shopping is easier now that 20 percent of U.S. households have high-speed Internet connections, and many others can shop during lunch breaks at work.

The single biggest online holiday shopping week is expected to start either Dec. 6 or Dec. 13, retail experts predict. Online sales in November and December, excluding travel and eBay, are expected to reach $21.6 billion, a 19 percent jump from a year ago, according to Jupiter Research. The average online shopper will spend $250, about the same as last year, but many more people will shop online this year -- 86.1 million vs. 73.3 million last year, said Jupiter analyst Patti Freeman Evans.

According to ABC News, About one in four Americans say they'll be buying holiday gifts online this year, up only modestly since 1999 — but the amount of money they plan to spend has nearly doubled.

I personally love to shop online. I have my favorite stores and return to them often. I appreciate the convenience of shopping online.

Is your business ready for the online holiday shopper? Perhaps you're not a retailer. But you still have to be prepared for the holiday shopper.

For Online Retailers

Vividence, a leader in Customer Experience Management products and services, offers 10 guidelines to help retailers improve the online customer experience and maximize the potential of their Web sites this holiday season.

Vividence's 10 guidelines for holiday success:

1. Save customer shopping carts for later visits. Customers do return later to purchase items "abandoned" in their carts. Make it easy for them by keeping their cart items for 30 days or more.

2. Offer a promotion or incentive to purchase. Promotions (or deals) differentiate sites from one another. Free shipping is the most common purchase influencer.

3. Show shipping prices early. Customers prefer to choose shipping options and see shipping prices in the shopping cart.

4. Make site registration optional. Customers are more likely to abandon their carts if you require them to register.

5. Consider a charitable donation tie-in. Customers increasingly want to donate to charity. Sites that contribute in some way will engender customer good will.

6. Keep products in stock. Out-of-stock products frustrate customers, especially when they aren't notified until they place items into shopping carts.

7. Provide order tracking. Customers want to reduce uncertainty about delivery time by tracking their orders. This will also reduce calls to customer service.

8. Shorten the checkout process. Customers prefer entry fields on one screen as opposed to multiple screens.

9. Be clear about delivery time. Customers want to know when their items will arrive.

10. Provide paper gift certificates. Gift certificates can influence purchase, and customers tend to prefer paper to e-mail gift certificates.

"As consumer expectations increase and more people plan to do their holiday shopping online, it becomes increasingly important for retailers to understand and improve the online customer experience," said Jeff Greenberg, president and CEO of Vividence. "By using Vividence's customer experience guidelines, online retailers will be better prepared to ready their sites for the holidays and capitalize on every shopper that visits their Web site."

The bottom line is that we online business people are now a major part of the economy. That means we can no longer afford to have sites and sales material that is not on a par of bricks and mortar businesses.

Women Rule
More women are now online. There are some 10 million businesses owned by women in the U.S. There are many women who make major decisions for their companies and their families. Women are a major force.

When I started out online, every call or inquiry I got were from men. Now I get more women than men inquire about my services and, in fact, more women clients at this current time.

The e-commerce gender gap appears to be widening, as more women opened their purse strings than men last quarter: the percentage of purchases made by women reached 62 percent in the fourth quarter with men accounting for just 38 percent of transactions. For all of 2003, online purchasing was split 60 percent women and 40 percent men --- a 5 percent increase from 2002 where the split was 55 percent women, 45 percent men.

78% of women in the US use the internet for product information before making a purchase and 33% research products and services online before buying offline. The study notes that 69% of the women surveyed go online daily.

Women continued to purchase online at a slightly higher rate than men (73 percent vs. 71 percent) for the third consecutive quarter.

Online business-to-business (B2B) spending for female-owned firms hit $18.5 billion -- 46% of the total spending for all small businesses in the US.

88 percent of women rely more and more on the Web for parental guidance and ideas, saying they are always looking for new things they can do with their kids. Eighty-four percent say they enjoy going online with their children -- pointing to trusted family sites as the place to reach kids and parents alike. During the past six months, 86 percent say they made an online purchase while 85 percent said they clicked on an online ad."

Online shopping peaks among higher-income and better-educated Americans. Thirty-nine percent of those in households earning $50,000 or more plan to shop on the Internet for gifts, compared to 15 percent in households earning less than that. Similarly, 35 percent of those who've been to college say they'll buy gifts online; it's just 13 percent among less-educated people.

So with these facts and figures in mind, make sure you and your site and your marketing are up to professional standards. Get a piece of the pie. You won't put on weight --- you'll just add bucks to your bank account.