Only 40 or so days left of what is widely predicted to be the biggest online spending spree ever so if you are an online retailer make sure you get your fair share of the bootee.

Make it easy for your customers to buy from you…

I realise as an affiliate its not my place to teach merchants how to do their jobs however as a shopper who buys a fair bit over the internet I’d like to make a few suggestions.

1. Ensure that your shopping cart process is not too complicated. Christmas is probably the wrong time for usability testing but grab a random person and ask them to buy something.
2. Make sure ALL your payment methods work, you can guarantee the one method on the blink is the one everyone is trying to use
3. Do you really need your customers to register. Christmas is a time of impulse buying and many customers will never ever return, insist on them registering and you may just drive them away, no need to switch off registration completely, just offer a quick checkout route.
4. Make the most of your 404 and search traffic. If a user arrives at a page on your site which doesn’t exist or looks for a product you don’t sell, give them a few suggestions rather than a blank page to stare at.
5. Remember to up sell to your customers. Make suggestions which compliment the original purchase, McDonalds do it (you want large fries with that) and online Amazon are the masters of the up sell with every page having “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”

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Online marketing is evolving at an astronomical pace and one of the major influences in this change is Twitter, if you have any type of retail business selling absolutely anything and you don’t use Twitter to get the message out there you are seriously missing a significant audience.  One of my websites is currently getting 7% of its traffic via twitter thats over 200 targeted visitors a day extra.

The most recent innovation by Twitter is Twitter Lists, and believe me Twitter Lists are awesome. Once people have added your twitter to a list your  tweets may potentially appear all over the internet. They will turn up on websites and blogs and there is a great likelihood that they will send you a lot of targeted traffic.

Oh and a little tip (for anyone who could be arsed to read this far down) Twitter Lists make an outstanding addition to your research armoury whether you are a merchant or an affiliate make lists of tweeters in niches you are interested in and bingo instant ideas.

For example I’ve just started a list of UK fashion merchants and fashion bloggers http://twitter.com/#/list/KeithBond/uk-fashion and I expect it to prove to be a useful resource of ideas and another way of getting through bloggers block.