A Surefire Way to Kill Your Sales This Holiday Season.

Thursday, December 12th, 2013
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A few weeks after our daughter was born this summer, a beautiful blanket arrived in the mail that had her name embroidered on it. The problem? We had no idea who sent it to us. In the box there was no gift card, no gift message, no packing slip with a message, nothing. Needless to say it required a fair amount of homework to figure out who ordered the blanket so that we could properly thank them. Does this experience sound familiar?

Now assume that you are placing online gift orders this holiday season for your family, colleagues, and clients (a reasonable assumption at this time of the year). Are you going to place that order if there is not a clear method to place a gift message? Do you want to create an awkward situation for the recipient like described above? Unlikely. You clearly want the recipient(s) of your orders to know that the gift is from you and that you are thinking of them. If you are not confident that the recipient will know the package came from you, you are simply going to place an order elsewhere.

While avoiding the above scenarios is common sense, it is amazing that a large portion of online merchants still do not allow customers to supply a gift message. If there is even a chance that the product you sell is going to be shipped to someone else as a gift and you do not allow for a gift message, your sales are going to suffer because of it. You work hard for your orders, why are you throwing a good portion of them away?

Thankfully, this is super easy to fix! Be sure to turn on Gift Message functionality in your eCommerce system. Even if you are not going to provide ornate gift cards, something as simple as printing the gift message on a packing slip can solve this issue. If you are using the Nexternal eCommerce Platform, you turn on the Gift Message capability in your settings section under site options in a process that will take all of 10 seconds.

This holiday online sales season still has many good days left in it at the time of this writing. Turn on your gift messaging. Now is the time to make sure you can capture every last holiday order, and this is a simple way to accomplish that goal.

Craig is the VP of Sales at Nexternal and is known in the industry as an expert in eCommerce, systems integrations, and online marketing. Craig has been with Nexternal since 2000 and his passion and experience are apparent to all who work with him.