Actinic ecommerce

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Top tips for busy periods (e.g. Christmas).

It's bad to get no orders, but it's much worse to get more orders than you can handle. For every order you fulfil, there's another unhappy customer who won't come back. Actinic had one customer whom they advised (in March) to carry out performance checks on their web site. Of course, they ignored them. December arrived, together with five thousand orders and their low-cost, shared web-server was visibly smoking. Actinic managed to keep everything running and no orders were lost but it could have been totally painless with a little planning.

Make sure that your ecommerce system is properly supported in the UK.

Sod's law states that problems will occur at the least convenient moment. So, you will always get an issue at your busiest time of year. It's the wrong time to be trying to telephone a developer who is asleep in San Diego. Christmas is a time for holidays. A merchant who was using a Java-based ecommerce package was unable to get any technical support because the developer was on vacation. She did not stay with that company, but she lost valuable time and orders in her peak trading period.

Make sure that you control the store.

In peak periods you can have a rush of new goods and they can go out of stock really quickly. You need to be able to respond quickly. You don't necessarily want a web developer setting the priorities for what products are online. Only you really know your business. You may want to change prices to clear slow-moving stock, or to substitute products when you get alternative supplies. You need to be able to add, modify and delete at any time - even late at night. So, your ecommerce software needs to be in your hands and under your control. That also means a bit of planning - the time to experiment with the software is when things are quiet.

Don't promise what you can't deliver.

You need to make sure that your delivery methods can meet the customers' requirements. That means only offering shipping that will work. Make it clear what the last day is that you can deliver by Christmas. Ideally, put this on the header or footer of every page in your online catalogue. Once the deadline has passed, change your message to make it clear that orders can't be fulfilled in time. With one large company, we had notices on the site that said which delivery methods would work in time for Christmas. They made it clear that an 'overnight' delivery on December 24th would not be by reindeer. When you change the message, you may also want to start your January sales with appropriate delivery dates. Then the bargain hunters who held off at Christmas will come and shop in your New Year sales.

Customers are in a hurry.

Christmas shoppers fall into two camps:

(1) those who buy in September and (2) those who buy after the 20th December. Most Internet shoppers are in the latter category. When they come to your site, it needs to be well laid out and all the links must work. Most of all, it must have a lightning-fast search capability than can match both by category and by price range. Your ecommerce product must integrate the two: search engines may be fine for text-based searching but they're very poor when you want a gift for an eight-year-old girl that's under £25.

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