Seeing as people shop as early as 6 months before Christmas, it would not be such a bad idea to start planning your holiday shopping promotions a little bit earlier than usual.
Hope all of you had a good time celebrating Valentine’s Day. For those in the States, the recent President’s Day weekend would have been a good holiday break. Speaking of holidays, it’s always good to plan the whole year out for your online business. Like WHEN to put your store on SALE, new PRODUCT launches and special OFFERS. It’s also vital that you have Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas marked early so that you will have a better plan on what to offer during those hectic sale seasons.
Phew! 2011 sure whizzed by fast! 2012 is a brand new year with new resolutions (and maybe some old spill overs!) and more exciting things to look forward to for this year. It’s going to be GREAT! I hope many of you had a great time celebrating Christmas and New Year with family and friends along with all the wonderful food that we just can’t get enough of.
Christmas, a time for shopping, sharing and giving, is just around the corner. Speaking of sharing, we’ve been giving away design gift certificates worth $247 every month since October to lucky winners of our “Like” InstanteStore contest. It’s SUPER EASY. All you need to do to be in the running is to swing over to our Facebook page (just click on the image below to go to our Facebook page) and click on the “Like” button there. That’s it! Winners will be notified by email and via Facebook as well.
I was searching for something the other day on my friend’s iPhone and I seriously thought that I needed a pair of glasses (and I am pretty sure I have perfect vision!). Why? Because that online store (won’t mention names) does not have a mobile optimized site! What a bummer! Took ages for me to look for a particular product and I finally gave up.
Anyway, just a shout out to all of you to remember to have your online store MOBILE OPTIMIZED. More and more people are using the smartphones to make purchases these days. More than 33.3 million U.S. consumers already engage in shopping-related activities on their mobile phones, 7%, or 2.3 million, of those consumers have made a purchase on their devices.
I know next Friday is Black Friday (busiest shopping day of the year!) followed by Cyber Monday (busiest online shopping day of the year!) . It’s going to be a shopping frenzy weekend, so that is why we just launched a tool that will help you sell more!
A few months ago, I purchased a pair of shoes online from a shoe store located on the other side of the planet. What surprised me was that they included a physical discount coupon with the item they sent. It actually turned out to be a good idea because I kept the coupon as a bookmark.
There’s a tool we have in our solution called the content slider. If you want to get the attention of visitors at your store without much hassle, this is the tool you should use. However, there are a few points you should take note of to ensure that you make the best of this nifty feature.
One of the most searched-for items on the Net are Free Ecommerce Web Templates. If you frequent Internet-related forums, you will notice that there will always be at least one thread on free ecommerce website templates.
Most paid ecommerce shopping cart software offer a number of free ecommerce templates to their subscribers. For free shopping cart software users, it’s not as convenient as they usually have source their own template designs. They may even have to commission a web designer to create a template for their store and then have the design integrated into in the solution.
At InstanteStore, we try to keep things simple for our merchants so they can concentrate more on the marketing aspects of their store. A simple shopping cart not only saves time, but helps improves productivity as well. However there is only so much a simple shopping cart can do to help merchants improve their bottom line.
The following are a few free online shopping cart tips to help merchants get the best out of their site.