12 Posts of Christmas: Tip 10—Give the Gift of Convenience
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Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
With fewer shipping days left in the season, it’s time, if you haven’t already done so, to start pushing gift certificates*. Offering gift certificates to buyers is very appealing for obvious reasons: no shipping deadlines to beat, no fear of buying the wrong gift, etc…. A few places you can consider promoting gift certificates:
- Home page: up front and center is a good place to catch your shopper’s attention. Incorporate a promotional graphic in your header and link it to your gift certificate page directly.
- Shopping cart: consider swapping out one or more of your cross-sell items with gift certificates. You can change the text headline for the cross-sell area to appeal to the convenience of gift certificates such as “Finish shopping for those last few hard-to buy people on your list” or something along those lines.
- Custom 404 error page: while you should have links to your category (section) pages and maybe even to your best-sellers, you may wish to promote gift certificates as well.
Here are a few examples of sites with fairly prominent promotion of gift certificates, but likely any retail site you visit this time of year will have something if they offer gift certificates:
Post Holidays Suggestion: If you are really ambitious, you can consider printing gift certificate vouchers as an option for buyers that wish to present the certificate in person. To do so, you would need add a checkbox to your checkout page that allows buyers to select if they wish to receive a printed gift certificate. You would also need to instruct buyers to enter their own email address in the recipient field for the gift certificate since the code is sent to the recipient automatically (and then there would be no surprise). You can then print the gift certificate code onto a card that you send to the buyer at the Billing Address. You can create your own gift certificate template or use a pre-made template to print on good card-stock, or hire a printer to create custom ones for your store where you add the amount and the number.
Learn more about gift certificates.
Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business
* Gift Certificate functionality is available only to merchants with Merchant Standard or Merchant Professional packages.
Comments
There may be a way to do this but it would require some custom programming. I don’t know of any store to point you to as an example, but that doesn’t mean someone hasn’t figured out how to do this. I would recommend checking out the Developer Directory and making a few inquiries with developers to see if they have a solution.
Paul
Comment by Administrator — July 11, 2007 @ 3:20 am
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This solution proposes that I, as the business owner, print the gift certificate and mail it to the customer.
Is there a way that I can create a page (which includes the gift code) that will appear in the browser and then the customer can print it on their own?
Comment by Scott — July 10, 2007 @ 4:04 pm