7 Ways to Screw Up Your Sales This Holiday Season

The 2007 Holiday season is poised to be yet another record-breaker for ecommerce. This could lead to a flood of orders, late nights for you and more work for your accountant. Never fear, here are 7 simple ways to miss out on your share of this year’s online holiday spending and avoid the headaches altogether:

1. Limit the ways your customers can pay you. Let’s face it, some payment methods will cost you a percentage of each sale to accept them, and it’s a lot of trouble to set up more than one payment method.Assume that your customers will adapt to your needs.
2. Refuse to offer Gift Certificates. Your customers shouldn’t be allowed to take the easy way out – make them choose that gift right now!
3. Don’t bother reassuring visitors that your site is safe. Hackersafe, Geotrust, BBBOnline… come on. This is the “Internet Age” – doesn’t everyone know by now to look for the little “lock” icon in the browser?
4. Treat each customer as a “one-time sale”. Email marketing is hard.Besides, you don’t need to maintain relationships with customers – this is the Internet, there’s always another buyer right around the corner.
5. Make it hard to order. If a shopper wants it bad enough, they’ll figure out on their own how to navigate your site and place an order. Call it “customer quality control.”
6. Ship only to the billing address. Sure, you’ll have to answer emails day in and day out asking “Can you please ship my order as a gift?” Gently remind them that it’s not your job to manage their gift-giving – it’s your job to protect yourself from a possibly fraudulent order. In fact, consider making customers fax in their credit card number and signature before you’ll ship at all.
7. Ship on YOUR timetable. Your business is your business… ship when it’s convenient for you. Your customer had all year to order – it’s not your fault they waited until the “week before”! Also, don’t worry about offering faster shipping methods… they only serve to set delivery expectations too high.

Congratulations, you can now rest easy knowing that this holiday season will have little impact on your bottom line. And don’t worry about the customers you’ll miss – your competitors will take good care of them for you. :)