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Chapter 13. Marketing and Merchandising Your Store Using Yahoo Tools

Chapter 13. Marketing and Merchandising Your Store Using Yahoo! Tools

What You'll Learn in This Chapter

How touse Yahoo! solutions to develop a merchandising strategy

How to do permission marketing

How to register with online shopping destinations

How to subscribe to Yahoo! merchant ratings and reviews

In Chapter 10, we discussed how to bring visitors to your newly established online storefront, and for little or no money. Now it's time to look at the different marketing and merchandising tools available to you through Yahoo! store. These are not free, but do offer an affordable way to merchandise your eCommerce store and drive shoppers to your website.

Yahoo! store offers ways to develop your merchandising strategy, create a direct marketing program, and receive what are called Yahoo! merchant reviews to help attract customers to your Yahoo! store.

Let's first look at developing a merchandising strategy and how Yahoo! store can help.

Developing Your Merchandising Strategy

Merchandising is the strategy of promoting goods inside a store, or in the case of a Yahoo! store, on an online storefront. In the real world, retailers promote in-store sales in a number of ways, using product positioning inside the store, carefully selecting where products are positioned on store shelves , setting up point of purchase displays to spur add-on sales, and even having timely promotional events.

Case in point: Ever wonder why products such as milk and eggs are at the back of a grocery store? These items are purchased frequently and thus drive us to the grocery store on a consistent basis. The grocery store knows this and makes us walk through rows of items throughout the store that we might not have considered buying if the store hadn't brought them to our attention for possible purchase. This is one form of merchandising.

In general, merchandising is how and where you position and display your products or service in your online storefront, including extras such as timely promotions and limited-time sales events. These merchandising tactics will have an impact on your sales. Other merchandising tactics include making it easy for shoppers to find what they are looking for and offering complimentary products or services related to what they are buying.

Your home page is a very important element of your merchandising strategy. It goes without saying that your home page receives the greatest amount of traffic on your eCommerce site. This is valuable real estate and should be exploited for merchandising purposes. Think of your home page as a place to showcase your most popular products, limited time specials, or seasonal events, and a way to draw shoppers into your store.

Automate Your Merchandising

Frequent rotation of well-priced products or services on your home page will encourage shoppers to return again and again to your storefront to see what is new.

Yahoo! can help you in this regard. Yahoo! provides several tools in Merchant Standard and Merchant Professional that automate key merchandising functions such as cross-selling , discount offers, and gift certificates. These tools are all available in the Store Manager.

Product Merchandising Page Templates

In the Store Tag Hub, you will find several page layouts that you can cut and paste into a web design application, such as SiteBuilder, to help you quickly create product merchandising pages. Layouts are available for product detail pages and category pages. These layouts are completely customizable, so you can create the exact look that you would like for your site. To add your products to these layouts, you just need to add the appropriate Store Tag codes.

Yahoo! offers three free merchandising tools (depending on the Merchant Solution package you choose) to help you promote the sales of your products or service (see Figure 13.1). They are

A cross-sell engine
Gift certificates
Coupons

Figure 13.1. Using one or all three of the free merchandising tools (cross-sell engine, gift certificates, and coupons) will help generate sales. These tools are available in the Store Manager.

Cross-Sell Engine

Cross-selling is an excellent way to increase sales from an existing purchase. In short, cross-selling is the tactic of offering additional products to current purchasers in an attempt to increase customer spending per visit. In other words, it's the ability to identify customers who have purchased a specific product or service in order to sell them similar or related products or services. Cross-selling works because customers are most inclined to buy at checkout time.

Yahoo! offers a cross-selling engine for your Yahoo! store. This is a very valuable merchandising tool. With it, you can create cross-selling opportunities using up to 100 related products in your store. You can create special offers and discounts using the cross-selling engine to entice shoppers to buy other products from your store.

Cross-selling is an excellent strategy for boosting a customer's spending per visit. Yahoo!'s cross-selling engine will automatically suggest related products to purchase when customers place items into their shopping carts.

For example, if a person places a digital camera in his shopping cart, the cross-selling engine can automatically recommend a memory card, batteries, or a photo-editing software application. You can determine which products are recommended, set start and end dates for special cross-sell offers or seasonal promotions, and even provide special pricing for cross-sell items to encourage your users to buy right away. The cross-sell engine is only available in Merchant Standard and Merchant Professional.

Gift Certificates

Why not print your own private-labeled currency? That's what gift certificates are because they can be spent only at your store. Gift certificates can be offered directly from your Yahoo! store. Yahoo! offers the use of gift certificates with its Merchant Standard and Professional plans.

Customers can buy and send electronic gift certificates from your site and the recipient can redeem the gift certificate during the checkout process. In addition, the gift certificate service will let you track the number of gift certificates you have issued and which have not been redeemed from the Store Manager.

Figure 13.2. Gift certificates are a great way to boost sales. The Gift Certificate code is usually emailed to the customer, but you may also send a printed certificate. The certificate code will need to be included on the paper certificate.

Coupons

Offering discount coupons is another merchandising strategy to attract shoppers to your web store and increase sales. At first you might think of coupons as used only in the real world. And, yes, you can offer coupons on your site that can be printed off and used in your real-world store. But if you're a pure eCommerce company, why not offer them directly on your site? Here's how.

With the Coupon Manager feature available in the Merchant Standard and Merchant professional store packages, you can create coupons that shoppers can redeem at your store. These coupons can be created for any purpose, such as a particular percentage or dollar amount off or free shipping. You can promote these coupons in your advertising, email, and marketing materials as a customer acquisition or retention strategy. Customers can redeem these coupons at checkout. The dollar amount or discount you specified will automatically be calculated and displayed on the following page. You can also track the performance of specific coupons, so you can see how many times they've been used, check how much revenue they've generated, and review graphs of their performance over time.