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Is Your Web Site Ready For The Holidays?

Don’t let your competitors get the best of you or your keywords this holiday season.

Start by taking a look at your online advertising options. The most popular varieties online are PPC Search Ads, Classifieds, CPM (banner ads) and email marketing.

Add seasonal keywords to your PPC ads like: Christmas gift, hostess/host present, toys, holiday greeting – whatever is relevant to your products and service or find a unique way to tie in a story to your business.

Give your site a Seasonal facelift to encourage the holiday spirit. It happens all around us this time of year in traditional businesses (just think about how early the Christmas music started playing in your local mall!) Online options to consider:

Spice up your logo – Take a cue from Google and add a little frost or a snowman to your company logo.
Add holiday graphics to your web pages – like a snowflake beside your ‘buy now’ buttons or a string of lights hanging from your page header.
Don’t over do it! - Above it was noted how shopping malls encourage holiday spirit (and spending) by drowning everyone in Christmas music, but it’s worth noting that you can’t always get away with the same online. For instance, it is generally not recommended streaming actual Christmas music onto your website or using big flashing Christmas light images everywhere.

Mall shoppers are forced to put up with this sort of thing, but on-line visitors will leave your site faster than Santa’s reindeer pulling his sleigh if you try cramming too much ‘spirit’ in front of them.

Consider a holiday promotion. Give people a good reason to purchase from you, immediately! Free shipping, free gift wrapping, online-only sales, bundle offers, seasonal discounts, coupons and other types of promotions all help encourage your site visitors to stop long enough to pull out their credit cards and spend some of their Holiday Spirit with your business!

Finally, take the opportunity to reach out to your existing customers and clients. Wish them the best of the holidays and take the time to thank them for their business. It’s not all about selling. It’s also about adding to, and building up, your existing relationships. This will increase the depth and value between you and your customers and eventually lead to future sales and referrals.

Now to you and yours, “Merry Marketing to All and To All a Good Site!”

Go to www.CustomerCatcher.com now for more free tips from Martin Wales, and look for other helpful resources from Michael Valiant at blog.1shoppingcart.com.

Support FAQS

The Do's and Don'ts of Passwords

1ShoppingCart and our Private Label Partners are committed to providing your eCommerce solution in the most secure manner possible. This year, we’ve been Certified for PCI (Payment Card Industry) and CISP (Cardholder Information Security Program) online security standards.

These standards, established by Visa, Mastercard and the credit card industry, help ensure the highest level of protection possible for online businesses by enforcing a series of security measures. This includes mandatory password changes.

These security standards, while currently optional for most businesses, will become mandatory in the near future and at that time all online businesses will have to either comply or be refused the ability to process online credit cards by Visa and Mastercard.

As part of this compliance, we must enforce a regular updating of your accounts Password information, essentially, the keys to your account.

To assist you, here are a few helpful “Do’s and Don’ts” when utilizing passwords:

Do’s:

Always use a combination of alpha characters, symbols and numbers
Always try to move around the keyboard (don’t use only the letters on the same row for example)
Try to use a combination of characters that do not form an actual word
Always use a minimum of eight characters
Always change your password just prior to terminating a business relationship with a person who may know your password
Remember to also change the password on any shared email addresses that may be listed within your account when terminating a relationship with a person who may know your password. This will prevent anybody from simply requesting your password to be resent to the email address they have access to.

Don’ts:

Never use names or birthdates of close relatives
Never share your information with anyone that does not have anything to do with your account’s operations
Never write the password down and store it in an easy to find spot
Never store passwords on your computer, PDA or cellular phone

By changing your Password, you are securing not only the safety of your account but the data in which it stores and the integrity of the environment on which the account is housed. Your site is as secure as you would expect your bank’s website to be.

Fortunately, with your 1ShoppingCart-powered eCommerce solution, you do not have to worry about compliance! We have taken care of everything from here so your business is automatically PCI/CISP compliant.

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