E-tailers don't have a workshop full of elves to help them get ready for the gift-giving season, but that doesn't mean they won't get some assistance. E-commerce companies are clearly in the holiday spirit as they roll out incentives and seasonal promotions to aid Web shop owners during the Q4 buying bonanza.
PayPal is offering rebates and free shipping, Yahoo! just added a "Bargain Center" to its up-graded shopping network and Demandware, a software company, announced new merchandising functionality.
Under the PayPal program, customers will be eligible to receive cash rebate offers up to $20 when making purchases on participating Web sites, including its sister company eBay, of course. Consumers can also take advantage of free shipping from online stores that qualify for the promotion, according to PayPal.
Ride the PayPal Express to More Sales
Sellers in North America can qualify for this promotion by offering PayPal Express Checkout. Qualifying merchants will be promoted on PayPal.com, eBay.com and through other online advertising channels. For more information about how to sign up, visit PayPal.com.
Cash rebate programs will be available to consumers from Nov. 23, 2006, through May 15, 2007. Free shipping promotions will be available beginning Nov. 23, 2006. You'll find more information on how to take advantage of cash rebates and see a list of merchants offering free shipping on this page of PayPal's site.
"We're offering these incentives to reward our loyal buyers with even more reasons to use PayPal, which in turn, delivers even more shoppers and sales to our merchants this season," said Dana Stalder, senior vice president of marketing and business operations for PayPal Inc.
Yahoo! Shopping gets a Holiday Make-Over
Meanwhile, Yahoo! is catering to folks who shop on a budget, so if you're offering seasonal promotions, it makes sense to take advantage of the new listing. The Bargain Center aggregates sales, coupons, free shipping offers, rebates and other promotions from across the Internet. Present-seekers can search by merchant, product or item popularity. They can also search coupons to find deals from specific brands and retailers.
Shoppers can also now access Yahoo! Shopping products, reviews and coupons directly from Yahoo! Search. For example, search results for "mp3 player" from the Yahoo! home page will include links to buying guides, markdowns and popular mp3 player brands. Another new feature: The new Yahoo! Shopping home page remembers recent searches and saves products so shoppers can keep track of items they're interested in and revisit them later.
Those with a customized My Yahoo! page may now add a "Popular Products and Deals" module from Yahoo! Shopping. Additionally, there's tighter integration between Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Answers, a question-and-answer forum set up last summer. Finally, the shopping site now has Buying Guides with reviews from "Consumer Reports" and the like added to its merchandise categories.
Software-As-A-Service Gets Savvy
In other e-commerce holiday news, Demandware, makers of on-demand e-commerce software, is spreading holiday cheer by adding free upgrades to help e-tailers prepare for the shopping season.
Among the enhancements in the release are faceted search, search engine optimization tools and new features that enable retailers to more effectively manage their inventory and market it across multiple sites. Benefits of these features are outlined below:
- UX Studio — Demandware's User Experience (UX) Studio lets e-tailer's directly control the design and functionality of their sites by providing visual design tools, A/B split testing, a library of pre-built business objects and support for Web 2.0 standards such as AJAX, CSS, and ECMA/JavaScript.
- Faceted Search — Search attributes are identified, segmented and intuitively filtered for drill down by any number of attributes such as style, color, size, etc.
- Search Engine Optimization Tools — In addition to its standard SEO tools for customizing page titles and spider-friendly URLs, Demandware integrated Google Sitemaps, enabling shop owners to directly feed site structure, content and metadata into Google's index.
- Catalog Syndication — A new Catalog Syndication feature lets online sellers share any or all data from any catalog across various storefronts. This eliminates the labor required to replicate and maintain product information as it is re-used for seasonal catalogs or across various brands.
- Price Books — This feature allows merchants to vary pricing for the same item based on a customer group or catalog code. For example, retailers can vary prices for first-time visitors, return shoppers, for people referred by a shopping comparison engine, e-mail campaign, affiliate site, wholesale buyer and more.
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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