Showing holiday shipping cutoff dates on your web site makes sense for many reasons. First, it sets the customer’s delivery expectation. Second of all, it will reduce the number of calls you’ll get asking if an order will be delivered by the holidays.

You should show this information in 2 places — the homepage and in checkout. I typically favor a rather prominent link on the homepage to a dedicated page that discusses holiday shipping. In checkout, you’ll want some messaging saying something like “Order by December xx to ensure holiday delivery.”

One thing we do effectively on the Virginia Favorites site is to list the estimated shipping date on every product page. This, combined with the holiday shipping information that lists cutoff dates, helps the customer determine if their order will arrive in time.

Before traffic starts to spike for the holidays, audit your paid search program (Google Adwords, etc.) for bids, new keyword combinations, and ad copy. You may want to create multiple ads for each ad group so you can quickly see which ad performs better. Also, make sure each of your ads click to a relevant page on your site.

For example, if you are bidding on “buy widgets,” make sure your ad headline has “buy widgets” in it and the ad, when clicked, goes directly to a page on your site that sells widgets. The homepage of your site is often not the best destination for a paid search engine ad.

It’s common convention for customers to register in order to check out, but many customers want to skip that step. While this may involve some IT involvement to make it happen, you can always ask the customer to save their information in an account after the purchase has been made.

If you must require customers to register, make sure they know the benefits of doing so, such as the ability to see order history, track orders as they ship, save shipping addresses, etc. When putting messaging on the screen to this effect, be succinct but descriptive.

Shipping costs are a barrier to online shopping, so offering free shipping can be a great way to increase sales if it doesn’t significantly erode your profits. Sometimes, sites offer “free shipping on orders over $x” to prevent significant profit erosion. You may also choose to offer this only to e-mail subscribers, best customers or promote this for a short period of time (one day, for example).

My clients have had good success with exclusive free shipping offers as well as “free shipping on orders over $x.” If you opt for “free shipping on orders over $x,” find an appropriate dollar cutoff by finding out what your site’s average order size is, then increase it by a small amount.

Customers get confused when sites don’t make it obvious that they’ve added something to their shopping cart. These days, it’s common for sites to have a “persistent shopping cart” — or a running tally of the number of items and total price of items in their cart — on every page. If your site has a persistent cart, make sure your site alerts the customer that they have added something to their shopping cart.

Many sites simply add the product with no alert, while others alert customers with messages that go unnoticed. This results in the customer asking “Did this product get added to my cart or not?” I recommend sending the customer to a shopping cart page when they click add to cart. If you choose not to do this, consider putting a bold, shaded message at the top center of the page just below your site’s main category links. Then add a link to the shopping cart just after the message.

Putting links to “similar items,” “related items,” “best sellers” or accessories on individual product pages helps provide a logical next step when a customer realizes that a product might not fit their needs.

Be careful though — this can be detrimental if these cross-sells take up more real estate and draw more attention than the actual product you’re trying to sell. Remember that product images draw the eye’s attention, so use them sparingly or use small thumbnails when advertising cross-sells.

Your nicely designed web site has pretty “add-to-cart” buttons that match the rest of your site, but are they blending in? Many of today’s graphic designers think that small add-to-cart buttons that match your site’s color scheme will be more aesthetically pleasing. But do you really want your add-to-cart button to blend in?

Imagine your add-to-cart buttons bigger and then have your designer create an add-to-cart button that is a size bigger than that. Choose a color for the button that stands out visually.

How do you know when your button is big enough? The first thing a customer should notice on an individual product page is the product image, the next is the add-to-cart button.

Hopefully your web site offers the opportunity for customers to sign up and receive promotional offers or a newsletter. The holiday season is a perfect time to dust off this list and put it to good use. Sending coupon codes exclusively for your e-mail subscribers is a great way to stimulate sales. Other good candidates for an e-mail marketing promotion include offers like “free gift with purchase,” “buy one get one free,” or you may just choose to spotlight your newest or best-selling products.

Whatever you decide to include in your e-mail promotions, be sure to include links to the products in your email by linking the product photo as well as providing a link. Include calls-to-action like “Click now for the best savings of the year” or other relevant messaging.

Finally, I’ve had great success sending e-mail campaigns for e-commerce sites on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings. These days and times have worked best for my clients.

A relevant, well-designed e-mail promotion can drive significant traffic to your web site. Want proof? Check out the following graph showing number of visitors for one of my e-commerce clients:

This probably sounds like a no-brainer, but many sites don’t have basic contact information in a clearly visible place on their web sites. Additionally, I’ve heard test participants say in usability labs that web sites that have a clearly visible phone number are more credible.

Consider putting your toll-free phone number at the top of every page. If possible, you’ll want to repeat this at the bottom of every page, and include a linked e-mail address at the bottom of every page also. Since e-mail is not as immediate as a phone call to customer service, include some messaging with your e-mail link that sets customer expectations. For example, you may say “Contact customer service via e-mail for a reply in less than 4 hours.”

Also, it’s critical that your phone number is at the top of every page in the checkout process. Having a phone number clearly visible in checkout can help capture those customers that might not have normally completed the process.

If you have an established web site with a larger customer file, you can probably quickly parse through your database and grab e-mail addresses of repeat or best customers. As a token of your appreciation for their repeat business, offer them a special deal that no other customer can take advantage of (and let them know it’s exclusive).

This is typically done through an e-mail marketing promotion where a customer receives a coupon code for a percentage off, free shipping, etc. In the e-mail marketing promotion, let your customers know how to take advantage of the offer and when it expires.

One of the biggest gripes that you’ll hear from customers that buy online is that they didn’t see the order total until the last screen — after they’ve entered in shipping and billing information.

If possible, allow your customers to enter a zip code and get their shipping rates and tax in the shopping cart. This will improve customer trust by showing all costs up front and help them quickly decide whether they want to proceed to checkout.

Some of your customers will want to search for products rather than browsing your neatly organized category structure, so make sure your product search box is visible without scrolling. Typically, sites include search boxes at the top of the page in the “header” area. You may choose to align the search box with the left, right or center of the screen, but make sure the search box is somewhere towards the top of the screen.

If your company has a catalog, make sure your search box can accept the product numbers listed in the catalog as well.

Don’t make your customers enter too much information in order to search — putting one clearly-labeled search field on your web site should be enough. Below are some examples:

Unlike a grocery store that puts staples like milk and bread at the back of the store so you have to pass by all of the other foods, consider putting 3-8 of your store’s best-selling items on the homepage. Show a small photo, the price with any savings or discount, and a link to see more information about the product. Make sure you link the product photos to the respective product detail pages as many customers will click your product photos.

Putting popular items on your web site’s homepage will make the products easier to find and encourage customers to dig further into the site.

It’s November 1st, and believe it or not, many e-commerce sites are already seeing traffic and sales pick up for the holidays. In fact, one e-commerce client that I work with has already seen sales pick up by 30%.

As an online retailer, you want to sell as much as possible, especially during this key selling season. Today, we’re introducing a series of blog posts about optimizing your e-commerce web site for the holiday selling period. Many of these tips will deal with your web site’s design, while others deal with merchandising tactics and marketing initiatives.

So check back every day for some quick advice to improve your online e-commerce sales.