Offer free shipping. Consider offering either free shipping entirely or follow the lead of Amazon.com and offer free shipping on all orders above a certain threshold value. Many e-commerce merchants find that e-coupons are a great way to facilitate this type of promotion while others build free shipping into their shipping cost calculator.

Offer volume based shopping discounts. A great way to do this is to offer a discount if someone buys a certain quantity of an item. Assuming your profit margins afford you this much room, you might want to say, "spend $100 and get a free t-shirt." Consumers love deals like this and it lets you move more merchandise and also increase sales.

Keep in mind that most online shopping occurs during the workday, from work. People have faster connections and are online more often while at work. With that in mind, try to ensure than any maintenance done on your site happens in the late evenings. Also, keep this in mind with your ad campaigns. As you know, many successful online businesses are using Overture and Google AdWords to one extent or another to drive traffic to their sites. Make sure you’re bidding up your keywords and driving traffic to your site during the workday in your customer’s market.

Make shopping online easy and stress-free for your customers. Make sure your site is easy to navigate and your products are easy to find. Use an always on-screen shopping cart with a shipping cost calculator built-in to the cart so that shoppers can see exactly what they are buying. Shoppers may occasionally like surprises, but only when it saves them money, not when additional charges and fees hit them squarely in the wallet. The key to the holiday gift buyer’s hard-earned cash is that you need to know that you’re not just competing against other online merchants; you’re also competing with brick-and-mortar stores and that omnipresent enemy, the mall. Make it easier for them to quickly and easily find what they need, get it at a reasonable price, and have it delivered in a time and cost effective manner. Once you’ve won a convert from mall shopping, you’ll likely have them as a customer for many holiday seasons to come.

Think outside the box. In this case, don’t just think of the holiday shopping season beginning the morning after Thanksgiving and ending at Christmas. Online shoppers often begin their holiday shopping weeks before Thanksgiving, as well as several weeks after Christmas. This is due to the fact that many buyers are conditioned that they should allow an extra week or so for order fulfillment and/or shipping times and, after Christmas, people have gift certificates to use.

Be specific with dates and times. Display cutoff dates on your website. For example, prominently indicate on your website that all orders placed by Noon EST on December 23rd will arrive in time for Christmas with overnight delivery and that all orders placed by Noon EST by December 20 with be guaranteed delivery by UPS ground in time for Christmas. Be sure to give alternative scenarios as to when the cutoff point is for multiple shipping methods. Also, if your item does not ship on the day ordered, clearly state that. There is nothing more frustrating to a buyer than when they pay $30 for overnight delivery, because they need the item tomorrow, only to find out that the item won’t ship until next week. Overnight delivery is just too little too late in that scenario.

How do you choose your keywords? If this isn’t a question you often ask yourself, it should be. Any online merchant that wants to make sure they are reaching their target audience and driving as many of them as possible to their website, and hopefully selling their goods to them, should be thinking about their keywords at least some of the time. What do you sell? Do you sell baseball hats? Well, if so, the obvious keywords are “baseball hats,” but what about alternatives? Some are obvious: “baseball hat,” “sports hats,” “sports hat,” etc. Then there are others that you might have overlooked, like maybe a “baseball cap,” or a “Yankees hat” or “Cubs hat.” The list can be endless but it is nonetheless very important to your business. If you can corner a certain word that nobody else in your industry has targeted, it can make all the difference.

Keywords are the lifeblood of an e-commerce site. For those of you new to the game, once chosen, these keywords mean everything, from what domain name to choose (can you guess what paper.com sells?) to your site’s title tags, alt tags, h1 tags, meta tags, your pay-per-click marketing campaigns, anchor text in your reciprocal linking strategies, your keyword density, and just about everything else in your marketing strategy. After all, you need to be able to know what keyword phrases your customers search for in order to position yourself to be on that search engine result page.

What are the best ways to choose your keywords?

Use the Overture search term suggestion tool found at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion. Search for “hats.” You’ll see that that the most commonly searched for variation of the word hat was “cat in the hat,” then “cowboy hat,” etc. Scroll down the list until you see the one most applicable to you. Perhaps it is “new era hat.” Assuming the manufacturer of your baseball hats is New Era, rather than optimizing your site for baseball hats, you might want to consider optimizing your site for New Era hats. This tool will give you statistics on searches done at Overture partner sites for the previous month. Overture supplies search results to partners that include Yahoo (who now owns them), AltaVista, CNN, InfoSpace and MSN.

As you well know, Google is everywhere these days. Their results are displayed at many major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and AOL to name a few. Needless to say, a top result on a Google search engine results page for one of your targeted keywords will do wonders for your business. One way to tell which Google keywords are most important is to use the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool found at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox. It does the same thing as the Overture tool and gives results in ranked order, just without the number of searches for that term over any specific period of time. A search for “hats” here tells us that the most common variation of “hats” in searches done on Google is for “cowboy hats” and then “baseball hats.” It’s definitely worth checking out.

Another tool e-commerce merchants often use is a tool called wordtracker found at www.wordtracker.com. It is paid service but well worth the return on your investment since pricing plans start as low as $7 for one-day’s use. They even offer a free trial at www.wordtracker.com/trial.

We have great news for e-commerce merchants. Similar to last year, holiday e-commerce sales are showing strong signs of growth. Jupiter Research has said that holiday e-commerce retail sales will reach $17 billion. That would be a 21 percent leap over the same period last year. This is the highest projected online holiday sales volume ever.

This jump is attributable to a number of factors but largely because online consumers are becoming more comfortable with the medium as a way to complete their shopping. Another contributing factor is the convenience of online shopping making it much easier for them to locate that hard-to-find gift.

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