10 Amazing Tips To Increase Your Online Store’s Order Size Before Christmas!

As we start gearing up for Christmas, the busiest time of the year for ecommerce retailers, we’re going to look at a number of ways to get larger orders from your customers…

Holidays Are Coming!

If you are an online retailer selling gadgets for Christmas, then you should already have started to prepare. We looked at steps that you should have been taking earlier this year in The Nightmare Before Christmas Part 1 and Part 2.

You should already have researched what you’re going to sell, started building up stock and warned your customers to order early.

If you have done all of this then well done, but one question remains…what can you do to make each customer’s order larger? Are there any tips to encourage this? Are there any ways to set up your store?

We’re going to look at a few ways to get larger orders each and every time, which means converting orders of one or two items into larger orders of perhaps five or six!

Tips To Boost Your Order Size

1. Inform the customers about your products! You could tell them about new products, or perhaps use a rolling banner (available for free from most ecommerce packages) to display extra or related products. One things’ for sure. If you don’t tell the customers then they’ll never know!

• Pay attention to the organisation of your e-store. I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s nothing worse than a badly organised store where it’s difficult to find what you’re looking for. If you just have general categories with lots of different types of a similar product inside, then your customers will have to open up the category and search through to find what they want which is troublesome and boring.

For instance, if you are selling MP4 players, don’t just have them in one category; construct subcategories to different brands, sizes, specifications etc within that category. If you make it easy for customers they will buy more, but if it’s hard they will probably leave your store.

• Offer a discount on your customers’ postage costs. If customers place more than one purchase then don’t charge them twice the postage! If you reward them for buying more then they will keep buying more.

• Highlight popular items that people are likely to want. Try to make things easier for customers. One great way is to highlight products which are your “top sellers” or “top rated”. The tagline, “people who bought this item also bought…” followed by similar or related items is also useful and clear.

It may be possible for you to offer tailored ‘suggestions’ to your customers. If so, do it! Consider Amazon for example, they profile each customer in order to show them what they think they’ll like based on what they’ve looked at before. We’ve all been hooked by this before and ended up throwing Amazon’s sugestions into our cart too, so you know the power of sugestion.

• Bundle different products together. By bundling two related items together you can increase sales swiftly. If there is a discount for the bundle it would be a typical supermarket-style deal, but it’s possible to bundle groups of products together at the same or even higher price because they are quite attractive to customers due to their convenience. This would be great at Christmas where you can bundle items to make an attractive ‘Christmas specials!’

• Keep your finger on the pulse. New gadgets sell a lot faster and will have your customers returning to your store to check on your new goodies! If you don’t refresh your products you’ll see your sales slow down as customers get bored of your store and go elsewhere to shop.

• Do more cross-promotion. Make it easier for your customers to find related or similar items in your store. As mentioned in point 1, the package you use to put your store online will probably give you ways to make banners etc so use it. Think about your products. Which match? Which are related? If someone buys one, would they like another?

• Give special offers. You should use one of the oldest sales tricks in the book, special offers with a time limit. You’ll find that by putting customers under time pressure you’ll receive an upturn in sales. If a customer wants to buy one item, but you offer them two at a discount which is only available for, say, today; you can bet they’ll take the bait and buy both. This is especially important before Christmas, to push customers to buy more gifts.

• Offer a target order size. You know the offer of free shipping for orders over a certain price, size or weight? That’s target order size. This is good for people selling gadgets as many can be small and fairly low in cost. Therefore if you can encourage people to buy more in order to have free shipping then it’s in your interest as orders of around one item alone can be so small. Set a target, say, US$50 and you’ll find that you see an increase in order size to this price as customers scramble to get free shipping!

• Bulk orders. You may not be a wholesaler, but you can still sell in ‘bulk’ to a certain extent. Gadgets are usually fairly small, but are ordered in small quantities as well. However you can increase order size by offering a special price for bulk orders of, say, 10 or more items.

Remember, it’s all about making things easier for your customers! The most convenient shopping experience tends to be the most popular. If you have any ideas to add to these 10, please add them in the blog comments. Good luck and merry Christmas!