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Planning your website for the holidays
By Sean McManus
Many customers like the convenience of
shopping online and will have already ordered presents, but every order invests a lot of
trust in the online retailer. If you don't deliver in time for the holidays, you'll lose
customers and suffer a poor reputation. If your despatch is delayed, you'll test the
customer's faith and encourage them to cancel the order and visit their high street
instead. The customer's peace of mind is essential to your e-commerce success, so keep
them informed.
It's equally important that you reply to emails and help customers who visit the website
even if they aren't buying anything yet. The temptation is to focus on the shop where you
can see the stock disappear, and let the customer emails stack up. But any one of these
could turn out to be your top customer. Your email customer service and website should
help to bring these people to your business. A survey by Dr. Lutz Erbring commissioned by
location services provider Vicinity found in November 2001 that 86% of respondents who
requested a map or driving directions to a store actually went there, and 60% of those who
travelled there bought something.
If you're planning any special offers or in-store events for the holiday season, make a
point of telling people about it on the website. Even if you've just decorated your
premises, you can make your business memorable and have some festive fun by replacing your
usual website photos of the team or the site with current ones. Some sites even use winter
graphics on their masthead, although this strikes a funny chord if you're a customer from
Australia, where it's summer now.
Take care that your celebrations don't make you less vigilant about risky emails. Circular
emails with animations and games are popular around this time of year, and they expose the
company to a greater risk of contracting viruses and consume a huge amount of computer and
team resource. Surfcontrol is a company that provides email filtering services to
companies. The company says that sending one 5-megabyte holiday screen saver takes up the
same amount of space on a company server as 160 plain text emails.
"Holiday emails, such as the ever-circulating elf bowling game and a host of prank,
joke and game messages, carry huge payloads that rob a company of valuable network
resources and interfere with productivity," said SurfControl's vice president for
global product development Kelly Haggerty. "Together with the increase in seemingly
innocent files that carry viruses, like the recent W32/Goner-A worm that comes in the form
of a screen saver from a friend, networks are being put under increasing stress that can
lead to extremely costly and disruptive network failures."
If your business is shutting down over the holiday season make sure that the website still
functions. You might be on holiday, but many people will get internet access for the first
time during the holidays and many others will at last find the time to go surfing. Don't
miss out on these visitors. Some people will be planning the year ahead, which can make
some business-to-business sites as busy as consumer sites, as visitors research their
potential business partners and investigate new ideas. Make sure you've got technical
support for if the site's server fails during the holidays.
Don't forget that not everyone celebrates the same holidays and people with different
beliefs or in different countries might not know why you're ignoring them. Make it clear
on your website when you're away and when you'll be responding to emails again.
Happy holidays!
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author: Sean McManus is the author of 'Small Business Websites That Work' (http://www.sbwtw.com), a book that tells
managers all they need to know to plan their website, manage the design team and promote
and operate the site successfully.
For more information, visit Sean's website at: http://www.sean.co.uk
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