In the marketing world a cross-sell is an attempt to sell a customer an additional product, related to a product they’ve already expressed an interest in. You see this all the time on major online retail sites. If you click a book on Amazon you’ll see a section on the page that says ‘customers who bought this also bought…”  If you click a jacket on the Express website you’ll see a column titled “may we suggest” with a list of products similar  to the one you’re viewing.

Huge online retail sites like Amazon may use complicated formulas to decide what to display to customers. These sites may have millions of products and millions of sales records to comb through and rely on to make product recommendations.

For a smaller business like mine (or yours), it’s a less daunting task. For my own site, I set it up so that any time I add or edit a product, I have the option to select related products. Those selections are what produce the cross-sells for my website. So now my product pages look like this:

Monday I talked about how I added tabs to my product pages. One of the tabs was a listing of current coupon codes. Since my coupon codes require a certain dollar amount spent, having cross-sells right under those coupon codes is a great way to encourage customers to select a second item.

I also added a cross-sell section to my view cart page so customers can get product suggestions based on items they’re likely to purchase.

If your shopping cart has a built in cross-sell feature, why not try it out. If it does not, but you have access to your cart’s source code, you (or a programmer) may be able to build in a feature like this quite easily.

If you’ve got more than a few products on your website, you’re probably going to want to make your website searchable. A site search is valuable for two reasons:

1. It helps customers quickly find what they want.

2. It can be a form of market research. (With a little programming, you can set up your site to record all the searches, and then you’ll know what customers were looking for. This can help you improve your SEO and drive the direction of your product offerings!)

So how can you add a site search to your website?

1. For the Not-So-Technically Inclined
Your shopping cart may have a built in search function. If it does, huzzah! You probably already have some form of site search. If it doesn’t, another option is Google.

If you’re cheap/broke, you can put a Google search box on your site for FREE. The catch is that your free search results will display Google Adwords. This could be bad news. Imagine you sell jewelry and your customer types “handmade silver jewelry” in your search box. Now your competitors’ ads are showing up on your website. Yikes!

If you’re willing to spend a little cash, you can solve this problem with Google Site Search. Starting at $100 per year, you can have the power of Google’s search on your website, with no ads.

Pros & Cons: The built-in search from your cart or Google solution is an easy one to implement. It’s also cheap or free, depending on which option you choose.

The downside is you have less control. You may not be able to track phrases searched. You may not be able to build some smarts into your search engine that apply specifically to your website.

2. For the Moderately-Technically-Inclined and Moderately Lazy/Cheap
Chances are you can find an open source search engine to install on your website. You’ll need a little technical know-how to do this, but it’s easier than creating an entire search engine from scratch. Here’s a list of some free open source search engines for PHP. With a little Google research you can probably find other options like these.

Pros & Cons: Open source code is free and you can even modify it to do things you’d like it to do. (Such as recording your search phrases.) It’s less work than writing your own search tool, but you’ll  need some tech savvy to get set up. It will probably also take a little more effort than something as quick as Google Site Search.

3. For the Technically Inclined/Those With Deep Pockets
For ultimate control of your search feature, you can always write your own search tool. (Or hire someone to write a search tool for you.)  This is a solution more commonly seen with bigger companies, but if you have the means/skills and you want the most control, you can certainly write a search tool.

This is actually the route I ended up going for my own website. I went this route because I wanted my search tool to:

• Intelligently interpret product types (i.e. It understands that “womens tshirt” and “ladies tshirt” mean the same thing)
• Intelligently understand colors (i.e. It understands that purple and maroon and lilac mean the same thing as far as my product colors are concerned)
• Work with tags (i.e. if a user searches for a forest t-shirt, I want the results to include all tees that are tagged with the word forest. My tagging system allows my search results to take into account user intent instead of just the words in product titles and product descriptions)
• Record searches so I can improve upon my search tool, improve my SEO and get new product ideas.

Pros & Cons: Creating your own search tool is going to require considerable technical skills or the funds to hire a programmer. Either route will require some time to gather requirements and write the code. The nice thing about this DIY route is that you get exactly what you want. You can build the search that’s best for your products and website.

Note: One last option to consider is a premium search tool like SiteSearch Pro, Nextopia or PicoSearch. These solutions are somewhere between the options I describe above.

You’re using a pre-built search tool so it may not do every little thing you want, but it does come with pretty sophisticated capabilities and also probably comes with support to get you set up, which is great if you’re not super tech-savvy.

I’ve been toiling away at some pretty big changes to my ecommerce website and I’m just about done. Some of them are already live. Although the changes I made may seem small (my site pretty much still looks the way it did before), my tweaks have improved the site usability. Today I want to talk about changes I made that make optimal use of limited space.

A truly effective web page conveys all the information a customer needs to make a purchase decision WITHOUT the appearance of an overwhelming amount of copy. So what do consumers need to know?

From your site navigation:

• All product categories
• All product sub-categories
• Various ways to shop (e.g. search, by color, what’s new, by collection, etc.)
• All informational pages (e.g. returns, contact info, company info, customer service, press, etc.)

From your product pages:

• Product description
• Product options (e.g. size, color, etc.)
• Product photos
• Sizing chart
• Shipping information
• Special Offers
• Related Products

So how did I present this information without putting a novel in the customer’s face? By making use of some simple CSS and Javascript.

My Navigation Fixes:
When visitors mouse over my top and left nav bars my product categories expand, displaying all their subcategories. This allows me to get over 35 links into my left nav bar without the customer having to see them all at once.

This new navigation scheme made space for me to merchandise products in more ways. Customers can now browse by collection, color, gift guides and popular themes.

My Product Page Fixes:
My old product pages were on the long side. To read all the information a customer would have to scroll pretty far down and might miss something important. I fixed this problem by adding tabbed navigation to my product pages.

I got a lot of my site improvement ideas by reading the articles I post here on Fridays and by visiting the websites of major brands. If you’re thinking about some usability fixes for your site, check out what major brands are doing like Nordstrom, Victoria’s Secret, Pottery Barn, Amazon. Pay attention to what information they display, and how and where they display it. You’ll benefit from the ideas of experienced, highly paid and specialized professional web designers.

Since a lot of the types of changes I’ve talked about today involve client side code, you can even sneak a peak at the code that makes other websites run. Just view the source of their pages and take a look at their CSS and Javascript. If you’re not tech savvy yourself, send your web designer to the sites you’re hoping to emulate and ask them to do something similar. While I’m not advocating copying other site’s designs, other sites are a great place to shop for ideas for your own website design.

I spent the last few weeks pulling my hair out. I was working on re-designing some of my ecommerce website (more on that later) and that means dealing with browser compatibility issues. If you’re designing a website with anything remotely fancy like CSS, Javascript, etc. you’re going to run into browser compatibility headaches. Here are a few tricks I used to make sure my site looked okay for all the different browsers.

1. Download ‘Em
If you’re working on a website re-design, download as many browsers as you can. Get IE, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera. You’ll want to view your site in all of them, so get ahold of as many as you can.

2. Get IE Tester
Internet Explorer has put out some finicky versions over the years. IE 6 and IE 7 render things quite differently (aka stupidly) than later releases. You can’t easily run various versions of IE on your computer, but you can get IE Tester. This free program will show you how your site would look in various versions of IE.

3.Visit BrowserShots
Browsershots.org is a free tool that allows you to see how your site will look on different browsers and operating systems. It takes a little time for your site to show up, but if you’re short on cash, it’s a handy resource. If you can spend a bit of money, browsercam.com is another way to view your site on different browsers/operating systems. A 3 month license if $40.00

4. Use Your Phone
If you don’t have a Mac at home, your iPhone is a great way to see how your site looks on a Mac. Mine was quite handy for debugging a pixel spacing issue I was struggling with.

Have you looked at your site on different browsers and operating systems? Even if you’re not in re-design mode, it’s still a good idea to make sure your site looks okay in different environments so that all customers have the same user experience.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Understanding PageRank to Optimize Your Online Store
• Combating E-Commerce ‘Friendly Fraud’
• Article Marketing 101
• How to Add Facebook Like to Your Ecommerce Site
• Important Restrictions to Include in Your Affiliate Agreement
• 25 Point Website Usability Checklist
• Crafting Your Retailer Elevator Pitch
• 5 Tips for Celebrity Outreach
• Not Selling Yet? Some tips from Meylah Part 1 and Part 2
• Comparison Shopping Engine Tips for Small Merchants
• Reduce Cart Abandonment by Publishing Discount Codes
• Design Sponge’s Updated List of Free Resources for Biz Owners

I’ve been quiet here lately because I’ve been crazy busy getting ready for the holidays. It might seem eons away, but in retail terms, the holidays are almost here. I am trying to wrap up my website enhancements for my own ecommerce website this week and I’ll be sharing my changes next week.

In the meantime, I want to call your attention to holiday advertising. As many of you know, I run co-op advertising websites though Smaller Box. These co-ops allow indie designers to share the cost of advertising and buy expensive ad space we can’t afford on our own. For my own ecommerce business, this form of advertising has been tremendously successful. That’s why I’m looking for partners to advertise with for the holidays.

My goal is to set up a special holiday advertising co-op website and gather enough members to split the cost of ads on sites like Perez Hilton, Dlisted, icanhascheezburger.com, Cute Overload, and Go Fug Yourself. These blogs get hundreds of millions of views during the holiday months and would bring a deluge of new customers, Facebook fans, newsletter subscribers, word of mouth, etc. It’s the kind of reach I could never afford to deliver for my brand on my own, which is why finding partners is a priority.

My goal is to offer membership to this co-op for a flat rate around $500.00 for the full year. (Meaning this one time payment gets your brand into the co-op for 12 months.) Those dues would be used to run ads from early October to end of December. Members would have their products featured on the co-op website all year long, even after the ads stop running. Members would also be able to promote on the co-op newsletters all year long.

Speaking of which, I plan to use the new co-op to get a new mailing list together. All co-op members would be welcome to share their promotions on this new mailing list, plus my existing lists (which go to thousands of indie shopping fans each month). I will be doing a special Cyber Monday mailing in November to the lists and all co-op members will be encouraged to share promotions. I will also be establishing a Twitter account and Facebook fan page for the new co-op so you’ll have even more avenues to promote all year long.

If you’re interested in becoming a part of this new co-op please enter your email address below. Once I get enough co-op members together I’ll email you with more details.  Space will be limited so if you’re interested please sign up now:

Your Email:

Earlier this year I wrote a tutorial on how to get listed with Google Products. Bing now has a very similar search tool and getting listed with them is also free. Is it worth the trouble to get set up? If it’s anything like Google Products, the answer is definitely yes. My ecommerce site sees frequent conversions from Google Products and with Bing growing rapidly as a search tool, it’s likely that their shopping tool will bring well-qualified traffic too.

To get started with Bing Shopping you’ll need to go here. Bing wants you to confirm that you’re a US company selling legal products in US dollars. They also want you to review their Merchant Integration Guide and lastly, they want you to fill out a Merchant Application Form.

After you fill out your application, a Bing representative will email you with a login for their Merchant Center and their FTP server. At this point you’ll want to…

1. Log into Merchant Center and fill in all the information Bing requests. This step is pretty straightforward, it’s just some web forms.

2. Create a feed for Bing
Like Google, Bing has a specific format they require for your feed, but their integration guide is also pretty easy to follow. Your feed must be tab separated and will end up looking like this.

If you’re tech savvy and your products are in a database, you can write a script to create your feed. (That’s what I did.) If you’re not tech savvy you can create your feed in a program like notepad. Put a tab between each field and put each product on a new line. You’ll want to save your file as “bingshopping.txt”

You will need to supply product ID, product name, product manufacturer, manufacturer product number, UPC code, ISBN (for books), merchant SKU, product URL, price, stock status, description, image url, shipping price, merchant category, bing category, shipping weight and condition.

3. Upload your feed via FTP. You’ll get an FTP address, username and password from Bing. Once you’ve uploaded your feed file, you’ll email your contact at Bing and let them know it’s ready. They’ll approve your feed and you’ll be good to go.

There is one hitch to keep in mind. Like Google Products, it’s best if you update your feed frequently. You’ll definitely want to update every time you have new products. I suspect products from fresh feeds will get better positioning in search (assuming they are relevant to the search).

To make sure your feed is fresh and up to date, the best thing to do is write a script that automatically pushes your most up to date feed to Bing’s FTP server every 24 hours. This will require a little technical know-how. I set mine up using a little PHP script and then entered a task in my cron tab to run the script every 24 hours. If you don’t know how to do something like this, at the very least, set a reminder on your calendar to upload your feed weekly, so Bing always has relatively fresh data from your site.

One of the toughest parts of working in retail is dealing with angry customers. Even though we do our best to make them happy, sometimes we can’t win. It’s important to be prepared to deal with wrathy customers so you’re not taken by surprise when they strike. Here are some our top tips that we apply when dealing with our own angry customers:

1. Be responsive
Never ignore an angry customer. Return their calls right away. Respond to their emails immediately. A fast response to a problem goes a long way, so make sure you’re not procrastinating when it comes to dealing with this type of problem.

2. Show some empathy
When a customer is mad, in their mind it’s them versus you. Coming to a resolution will go more smoothly if you can change the mindset to a problem you’re working to solve together. To get them off the offensive, let them know you understand their frustration. Thank them for calling the problem to your attention or taking the time to contact you.

For example, imagine a customer is angry that their order never arrived. You check the package tracking number and see the post office has screwed up. When you respond to the customer, you’ll want to say something like. “Thank you for taking the time to contact me about this issue. I completely understand your frustration. I checked the package status with USPS and it appears they’ve lost the package. Obviously this is very upsetting for me too. I will be filing a claim with them,  but in the meantime, I want you to have your products, so I will put a replacement package in the mail today.”

3. Do NOT lose your cool
People can be really nasty and inappropriate. They call names, they curse, they yell. There’s no need to stoop to their level. Whatever they say or do, it’s important to remain calm and pleasant. Refusing to engage with their boorish behavior sometimes even shames them into changing their tone.

4. Do not make them feel stupid
Sometimes a customer is angry and the mistake was on their part. Maybe they chose standard shipping and then got angry when the order didn’t arrive over night. Maybe they’re freaking out because they had to pay customs fees, even though it clearly stated on your website that customs fees might be incurred on international deliveries.

In these situations, the first thing to keep in mind is that people don’t always follow directions. They’re busy and distracted and maybe did not pay attention when they were shopping on your site. When we get complaints that fall into this category, we always apologize for the confusion and then explain the steps we took to try to provide them with detailed information. We close by asking them for their input on how we could do a better job communicating the overlooked information in the future.

5. Do not give in to unreasonable demands
Angry customers can sometimes expect you to bend over backwards to appease them. Emphasis on the bending over. This kind of thing is often associated with customers who are throwing tantrums. They expect their bullying aggressive behavior will intimidate you into giving them whatever they want.

If the mistake is on your part, you probably should offer them something to make it up to them. When things go awry on our end at our ecommerce company, we often do things like gift cards or free shipping. We don’t give away entire orders for free or hand over hundreds of dollars in product for compensation. You want to make sure whatever you’re giving the customer to appease them isn’t above and beyond.

At the end of the day, the most you really owe them is a refund on returned merchandise, and if someone’s truly being an implacable ass, sometimes that’s the best course of action. When we’re dealing with someone truly impossible in this situation, we’ll typically say, “I’m really sorry you’re not satisfied with any of the offers I’ve made to try to make this right for you. We’d be happy to refund your money in full if you’d like to return your order.”

6. Try to make things right
If there’s something you can do to appease the customer, and it’s not unreasonable, offer to do it. If their order shipped later than it should have, offer free shipping. If their product arrived damaged, offer to replace it free of charge and send them a coupon code for their next purchase.

7. The best offense is a good defense
If you know you’re going to have a problem, communicate with your customer as early as possible and let them decide how they want to handle it. If an item they ordered is out of stock, notify them immediately and ask if they’d like a refund or if they’d like to wait. If they want to wait, offer to ship their order for free if it’s going to be a long wait. If you know 50% of the clasps on the necklaces you sold are breaking, contact customers who ordered the item and offer them a free repair. Taking the time to warn customers about a problem before it starts usually keeps them from throwing a tantrum later.

The holiday season is both the most lucrative and stressful time of the year for online retailers. A big part of the aggravation comes from shipping. Customers have high expectations and they often want you to do what’s beyond your control. To avoid the wrath of your customers, here are a few things you can do to minimize your shipping woes:

1. Encourage Early Birds
The best way to guarantee holiday delivery is by getting customers to order early. You can do this by offering special incentives for early birds. Send out Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions to your mailing list contacts and social media contacts. Offer a special coupon code for customers who order before December 1st.

This offer may get your biggest fans to order early. This will get them their orders in plenty of time and keep your company in their good graces.

2. Post Shipping Deadlines Clearly
Figure out what the dates are that you must have orders in by in order to offer delivery by Christmas, and then post this information on EVERY page of your website. Your home page is NOT sufficient. People will enter your site from product pages and may never see your home page. This is why it’s so important that customers are able to find these deadlines from every page.

You may need to create a table like this:

This will allow customers to easily see the options they have available.  Be sure that the dates you select not only account for delivery time, but also for the time you’ll need to get your orders ready to ship. Your business will be busier than ever and you may not be able to get orders packed the day they come in.

3. Offer Multiple Shipping Options
If at all possible, allow customers to select an upgraded faster shipping method, in case they’re ordering later in the month. This will be a more expensive option, but it still gives the procrastinators the option to get their order delivered on time.

4. Be Honest With International Customers
International shipping is by far the most problematic part of holiday shipping. Global customs and postal agencies are flooded with packages and it’s very hard to know how fast your order will be delivered. I had a package arrive at a Canadian customer’s home over a month after I shipped last year. I shipped at the end of November and the package didn’t show up until mid January!

The honest truth about international shipping is that the only way you can 100% guarantee delivery by a certain date is by using a private courier like UPS or FedEx. These services will not only charge a hefty delivery fee, they’ll also charge a hefty fee for expediting your package through customs. If you offer this option to customers, be sure to warn them about these charges.

If you go with USPS international shipping, using Priority or Express options will help get your package to the destination country faster, but it can’t force your package through the destination country’s local customs and postal offices by a certain date.  Be honest with international customers about your international shipping offerings. You can tell them how long it should take to get their order with your chosen delivery method, but unless you use a private service, do not make iron-clad guarantees.

5. Offer Gift Cards
Gift cards are the perfect solution to holiday shipping woes. They can be delivered as late as Christmas Eve, and they make a great gift since the recipient can pick exactly what they want.

I link my gift card page on my shipping deadlines page. That way I can send customers to the gift cards if they’ve missed cut off dates.

Since most of my small biz readers around here are designers, I thought I’d take some time to talk about how to do collaborations with other designers. It’s something you may have been considering, but weren’t sure how to proceed. Since this is something I just recently started doing for my own apparel label, here are my top recommendations.

1. Pick the Right Partners
Choose the designers you collaborate with carefully. Pick someone whose aesthetic sense meshes well with your own. If you’ve established a modern brand that’s all about clean lines and muted colors, you don’t want to partner with an artist whose work looks inspired by a tattoo shop.

You may want to start off by working with artists you know. If you don’t know anyone who’s a good fit, try contacting some designers whose work you feel would be a perfect fit and send them a proposal.

2. Discuss the Division of Labor
Discuss exactly who will do what for the collaboration. If you sell soaps and you’re having another artist do your package design, make sure you decide who exactly will be responsible for taking the final art to the printer and paying them.

If you’re going to be doing marketing, discuss who will be doing what. Will you both be blogging about one anothers’ businesses? Will you be mentioning the project in your company newsletters? Is using a photo depicting collaborative work in advertisements acceptable? Who will actually hold and sell the merchandise?

3. Payment and Notification Policies
Make sure you discuss who gets paid what? Determine when payments will be made and how each partner will be notified of sales.

My apparel label gives guest artists 50% of net sales and we’ve programmed our site to notify our guest artists each time a sale comes in that involves their collaboration. We have our site calculate commissions at the end of each month and then we pay our partners.

4. Legalese and Other Logistics
Make sure you save all emails exchanged for legal reasons. You may also want to have a collaboration agreement that you ask partners to sign. At the very least, make sure you have clear stated terms on the rules of your collaborative project. Also discuss whether the relationship will be ongoing, have a limited edition of product attached to it, be canceled after a certain date, etc.

Make sure you also discuss matters like coupons or cost increases that may affect the commission you can offer your partners.

Lastly, if your products are branded, and I hope they are, discuss this with your partner. Will they object to having your brand’s name on the final product? Will you be listing two brand names on the final product? How and where will you be giving credit to your collaboration partner?

The most important thing is clear and detailed communication. Make sure you both feel that all questions have been answered in a satisfactory manner before any collaborative work begins.

Have you done a collaboration? What tips would you give?