Is Your Store Ready for the New Year?

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Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

With the 2009 holiday shopping season having come to a close, it’s a good time to take stock of how your store performed, to update any outdated content still lingering from last year, and to learn from what worked and what could be improved to get your store and promotions in top shape for 2010.

Out with the old, in with the new

First, make sure your store is ready for the new year. As Yahoo! Merchant Solutions’ Mike Ober recently tweeted, be sure to update your copyright information (change 2009 to 2010), and remove any holiday messaging and promotions that are no longer relevant. A store with an outdated copyright year, messaging, and promotions may cause customers to question if your store is still doing business, your business’ attention to detail, and can raise doubts about how long an order may take to process and ship if the store itself isn’t up-to-date. It’s also a good time to review your About Us page. As a page that can play a key role in building trust and increasing conversions, it’s important to make sure all information and any links on this page are current.

If you’re using search campaigns, make sure any messaging specific to the holidays has been updated. For Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store Merchants using Yahoo! Web Analytics, data collected over the holiday shopping season can be used to optimize marketing campaigns for the new year and shopping days leading up to Valentine’s Day. (See the Yahoo! Web Analytics section of this post for some suggested reports to look at.)

Customers like free shipping

Never forget the power of free shipping. According to comScore, free shipping was one of the "clear winners" of the 2009 holiday shopping season. If you’d like to offer free shipping as a Valentine’s Day promotion, but aren’t sure how to set this up, our online help page explains the ways in which you can offer free shipping for orders from your store. If you’d like to offer free shipping to a select group of customers only, remember that you can create single-use coupons good for free shipping, and can also require a minimum purchase amount to qualify for a free shipping offer.

Coupons for free shipping can be created using Coupon Manager.

Review your analytics reports

If you are a Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant using Yahoo! Web Analytics, now is a good time to review your reports. While the key performance indicators you’re most interested in may vary by store, some good places to start are a review of your checkout performance (requires prior setup of a checkout scenario analysis), page bounce rates, conversion ratio by search phrases, top internal searches, visitor navigation paths and paths for conversion, and your campaign reports (requires prior setup of campaign tracking). You may also want to dive into your demographics reports to learn where your potential customers are coming from, along with their age range and gender, so you can better optimize your store promotions and your marketing campaigns.

If you’re not yet using Yahoo! Web Analytics, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – turn it on. Yahoo! Web Analytics is included in your Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store plan, and by leaving it disabled, you’re missing out on incredible amounts of valuable data that can help you improve sales. If you’re new to Yahoo! Web Analytics, or would like to review some of the data available to you, be sure to check out MarketMotive’s free 30-minute video showing you "4 Quick Ways to Improve Your Store" using information from your analytics reports. If you’re already familiar with Yahoo! Web Analytics and are looking for ways to dig deeper into your data, you may wish to watch Dennis Mortensen’s archived webinar session that focused on using a revenue participation metric for content optimization, and how to use metric alerts for insights into search phrase opportunities.

Use demographics reports to optimize store promotions and marketing campaigns.

Make the most of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

If you’re a Standard, Professional, or Yahoo! Store merchant using Cross-Sell, and you have merchant-created (manual) cross-sell rules in place, take a moment to review your current cross-sell rules. Are they up-to-date and inclusive of new products in your store? And, are you using auto-suggest? As we’ve mentioned in a previous post to the blog, on average, auto-suggested cross-sells drive 30% higher revenue per order than cross-sell rules created manually by merchants.

A couple of good reads to begin the new year

January is the start of a new year, but it may also come with a higher volume of returned merchandise following the holiday shopping season. While returns aren’t the happiest way to begin 2010, your return policy provides a great opportunity to impress customers and earn their business in the future. This article from Forbes.com looks at how Zappos uses free, no-hassle returns to their advantage, and integrates feedback about returned merchandise to improve their web site content and reduce returns.
If you’re concerned about Google ringing in the new year with changes to their search results and what it means for your search ranking, you may be interested in articles from SEOmoz and TechCrunch about the search changes. (The basic summary? Don’t panic.)

On behalf of the Yahoo! Small Business team, thank you for continuing to allow us the opportunity to be a partner in your store’s success, and happy new year.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

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