Online retailers might want to take a look at Atlas Solutions’ Holiday Online Shopping Report: 2006-2007 when planning your advertising and promotional spend for the upcoming holiday season.

A couple of things that stand out about online holiday shopping behavior:

• Monday’s rule as far as online shopping goes and the peak time is between noon and 4 p.m. EST (correspondig with the workweek lunch hour)
• Tuesday’s are close behind in online shopping volume in the weeks leading up to Christmas
• The second Monday (tagged Cyber Monday) before Christmas has established itself as the busiest online shopping day showing sales activity almost 90 % greater than average. This year’s Cyber Monday will fall on December 15th if the study’s data holds true.

Strategies for getting your share of the online shopping dollar?

1. Plan your online advertising or email promotional campaign to coincide with the Monday & Tuesday workweek lunch hour buying rush
2. Emphasize guaranteed shipping delivery as the clock winds down to Christmas

Click Atlas Solutions’ Holiday Online Shopping Report to access all the details…

Mark Sanborn is a hall of fame speaker and the best selling author of The Fred Factor and You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader. He’s also a friend and client. He has a new web site and, in addition to his books and training products, he makes several free resources available. One of them that I highly recommend is called The 10 Commandments of Customer Service: 150 Ideas for Improving Service.

Diamonds, gold & rubies abound in this customer service treasury. For example every e- or retailer needs to embrace Idea #47:

Flight attendant: “Sir, would you like the chicken or the beef for dinner?”

Passenger: “Which do you recommend?”

Flight attendant: “Neither. I don’t eat this food.”

Question: Does the flight attendant not eat the food because it is bad, or is the food bad because the flight attendant doesn’t eat it? When you don’t use your own products or services, you lose touch with the customer’s experience.

If you haven’t walked a mile in your customer’s shoes, eaten the food you’ve served them or drank the Kool-Aid® you’ve poured into their mugs then I guarantee you that you are leaving a ton of sales by the trailside. (In a 2006 survey of online shoppers, Marketing Sherpa discovered that nearly 60% of these shoppers abandoned their shopping carts. Deludedly enough, online retailers guesstimated their abandonment rate at 20-30%, less than half of the actual number!).

How many times have you been frustrated by an on or off line shopping experience due to byzantine checkout procedures, missing-in-action or clueless sales associates or impossible to locate products? Do you find yourself wondering who would design such a travesty? I find myself wondering who the owner is and asking myself if they have ever shopped there themselves. Shopping cart abandonment is a significantly larger issue in the online world where it is so much easier to click to the next etailer’s site than get in your car, hazard traffic and cruise the lot for a parking space that’s not halfway to Toledo.

So what do you do to improve your customer’s experience?

First, drink your own Kool-Aid®… At the most basic level, you shop your own site. And then you shop your competitor’s and if you prefer the competition’s experience that’s a big, red flag right there. Even if your happier with your site’s results than your competition you still need to be looking for new and better ways to improve the customer service you provide. Jeff Bezos, founder & CEO of Amazon.com, allocates time every day to come up with several ideas for improving his web site. The man’s a multi-billionaire yet he’s obsessed with providing an ever better experience for his customer. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why he’s a multi-billionaire.

Second, have a Kool-Aid® party… invite your employees, friends, neighbors, golf partners, kids’ friends and anybody else you can think of to shop your site and give you candid feedback. Establish some basic scenarios and see how easy it is for them to accomplish. Sit back — quietly, no intervention — and observe. Give ‘em a few bucks or buy the beer and pizza. It will be one of the best investments you ever made.

Third, don’t fixate on perfection… Try something, measure the results (so many great tools for this; Google Analytics is a great place to get started), if it works, improve it, if it doesn’t, do something else. The web is an instant feedback mechanism. With just a few tools you can tell what’s working and what’s not quickly and for relatively few dollars.

Fourth, steal Your Competitor’s Kool-Aid® Recipe… If you see somebody doing it better and it’s not copyrighted or patented, adopt it for your site. You don’t have to be the master innovator, just the master executor.

You know the old entertainment saying/joke? The one that describes a person has “having a great voice but a face for radio.” The implication is while their voice is show biz quality their looks leave something to be desired.

Well, sometimes that’s the case in podcasting too. Except my twist is, “he has a voice for print.” In other words, his content his brilliant but his audio delivery is sleep inducing at best, painful at worst.

This became ‘painfully’ apparent to me while listening to a audio intro to a new information product offered by an internet copywriting guru. I won’t mention his name because he’s a pretty brilliant guy and I’ve been following his e-newsletter for years.

However, he’s now using Free IQ – which bills itself as The Marketplace for Ideas – to promote his products. Free IQ gives you a place to post an introduction to your product and a media window where you can deliver video or audio content with the capability to sell that or other content from that page. It’s actually a pretty cool idea for all of us infopreneurs. You can sell content, give it away or do both. They host and distribute your free content for free but if you sell it, hosting is free but FreeIQ takes 5% (and CC processing fees) of the selling price.

Anyway, my copywriting guru is using this to sell eReports. Unfortunately, he’s using the audio component to pitch his product and listening to him is actually so painful that I haven’t been able to make it all the way through. I click away.

My point is, if you’re into podcasting or vidcasting, practice. Practice your delivery, your inflection, your breathing, your pacing, your enthusiasm – all of those things that positively or negatively impact your listener or viewer. Don’t just drone into the microphone in your less than Paul Harveyesque voice. Subconsciously or consciously I’m equating the quality of your audio delivery with the quality of your content so when your voice or video delivery drives me away, it’s driving me away from your opportunity to capture me as a customer.

Like the other old joke goes, “Q. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? A. Practice, practice, practice!”

If you have info products you’d like to give away or sell – anything from eBooks to online courses to video and audio – you might want to consider FreeIQ.com (full disclosure: I signed up as an affiliate so this is my affiliate link). They’ll host, stream and distribute your free content for free and they make their money by charging 5% of the sales price (plus credit card processing fees) for the content you sell. They also have a ranking system in place that gives content better positioning depending upon the popularity of that content.

If you’re an infopreneur this may be the place for you to get broader exposure of your ideas and expertise and maybe make a few bucks to boot.

It’s an interesting concept and one you might want to explore. Once on the site, be sure and click on the Learn More link for a thorough explanation of their concept.

Here’s a snippet of info gleaned from OMMA Magazine … Only 35% of the U.S. population as a whole feel somewhat to very comfortable using credit cards on the internet.

What do you do if you’re selling goods on the internet? Give them alternatives like an 800 order number they can call or an order form they can download and mail or fax back. It’s even more important to provide purchasing alternatives if you’re serving an older population. For example 65-and-older men’s confidence in purchasing with credit cards is only around 14% … And you wonder why your Grecian® Formula sales have stagnated online?