Aabaco Small Business

Trending in the New Year: Sales spikes in January

By: The Aabaco Small Business team

In September, we shared tips and best practices around preparing your store for the busiest shopping days of the holiday season, which for most of our retailers falls between late November and the end of December. However, this isn’t the case for everyone; while the traditional holiday season is an important time to ramp up on advertising and promotions to take advantage of the typical holiday shopping season boom, some retailers see a New Year’s sales spike in January.

We found that Aabaco Small Business merchants that self-identify as seasonal retailers saw a 25% increase in sales in January 2016 compared to December 2015, while tools & hardware retailers saw an 8% increase in sales month-over-month. Other retailers saw increases in industry categories like toys & baby (up 4%), computers (up 3%) and, home & office furniture (up 2%).

Not surprisingly, health and wellness retailers also had a good January, perhaps due to all of our New Year’s resolutions. For example, Dan and Mary Schlenger, the husband-and-wife team behind OVitaminPro.com, saw a 16% spike in sales the first two weeks of January compared to the first two weeks in December. The Schlengers started their business on our platform in 2007, and they have continued to leverage their unique digital health and wellness services to reach customers who are looking to maintain a healthy lifestyle in the New Year.

What does this mean for you? If you’re a retailer in the categories mentioned above, or you can find a way to “lean in” to the renewal and resolution-focus of the New Year, we recommend planning ahead for a January “holiday shopping season” next year. Below are some quick tips to keep in mind once you start preparing for the next New Year:

As other stores are ramping down on their advertising and promotions, be aggressive with your New Year marketing as soon as after-Christmas sales are over.
If sales during the typical holiday season (November - December) were good, make sure you stock back up on your most popular items, as sales will likely continue to pick up in January.
Consider your vertical and customers; the holidays are focused on presents, but depending on what you sell typically off-peak months could be growth opportunities. Not everyone stops shopping when Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over. Perhaps it’s an opportunity to highlight different items or categories than you would during the retail-focused holiday.

Remove Online Checkout Hurdles that Lead to Abandoned Carts

By Phil Grier
Yahoo Merchant Development

(This is the final post in a 3-partseries on increasing ecommerce sales. The preceding posts focused on organizingyour online store and on design elements that convince customers to buy.)

Sofar we’ve provided tips to optimize your homepage, navigation, section and item pages, and finally we’ve arrived at the bottom of the funnel: checkout. I’ve worked with a lot of the merchants over the years who are surprised to see how many customers made it to checkout, and then leave without buying. Here are some conversion optimization tips for this final step in your purchase funnel.

You know the goal here, to complete the sale, but there’s another goal that should be top-of-mind in this exercise. You should be proactively addressing your shopper’s concerns in the cart.

The top concern in every study of cart abandonment reasons is the same: shipping costs. If you have a free shipping offer, is it clearly stated? If you’re charging, are the costs reasonable and competitive? Make sure you highlight store ratings and fast shipping messages to let shoppers know you are committed to getting their order to them in a timely manner.

Hopefully you had some kind of trust mark in your header earlier; here in checkout (especially on the billing page) is the ideal place to highlight your cart security. Make sure your customer service info is visible at each step of the checkout process. Overall, you want checkout to remind shoppers that you are trustworthy and will take care of them after the sale is completed.

Use comments on past orders and customer service emails to help customize your checkout to proactively address the common concerns and points of confusion communicated to you by your previous customers. Things like how long it takes to ship and return/refund policies can be addressed concisely in checkout. If you link to your policies page make sure you append target=“_blank” to the link so it opens in a new window. This is a good rule to follow for any links that lead out of your checkout. Once your buyers enter the checkout, keeping them from abandoning it to get more information will increase conversion.

By looking at your site from your visitor’s perspective, you can start to see obstacles you may have missed. Hopefully this will help you with your site review process as we enter the new year for an even better year of sales in 2015!

Phil Grier is a 7-year veteran of the Yahoo Merchant Development team, which works with Yahoo merchants to improve their online stores and increase their sales.