Jumpstart Your Holiday Season Sales - How To Make Sure You're On The Gift

Time to drum up some holiday season sales again. What have you planned? Give me 5 minutes and I'll give you a quick no cost idea. We all know everyone is stressed out trying to figure out what to buy for their loved ones. They want the gift to be perfect yet not spend too much. Recipients have a list of items they long for, constantly crossing their fingers they'll get it. Over the recent years, one trend has been gaining popularity thanks to the Internet. And it's a wonderful tool to help your holiday season sales. It is the wish list. Wishlists are truly the perfect solution for everyone. People get what they want through suggestion and the giver becomes the hero or the heroine of the season.

In the recent years, online stores who have implemented a wish list system have reported better holiday season sales and overall positive results off season too. Many would not dream of going this season without a wish list. Shouldn't you take advantage of this technology too? Maybe you're not quite sure how it works and how it would work with your existing system. You know what? It doesn't have to.

Depending on your shopping cart system, you may already have a wishlist built in. Maybe you have overlooked it, maybe it's buried deep in the features and options. Check with your shopping cart support staff. If you're using popular carts like OSCommerce or Zen Cart, ask your webmaster to check the contributions.

What if your shopping cart just doesn't have the feature or maybe your webmaster has already confirmed there are no readily available plugins. From here, you'll have to decide if you want something that's built into your shopping cart system or you won't mind being a vendor of a third party wishlist site.

Each has it's plus and minuses. A built in system might be more seamless for you but would the customer want to keep wishlists all over the Internet? Take a look at your own wishlist. How many of them can be bought from one store? Certainly not all. You probably have one item from this store, two from another store and so on. This is why wishlist sites are so popular; because people can keep and share the list in one place.

If you have a very large store and you sell a variety of items it may make more sense to create a built in wishlist system. That way people stay on your store and you encourage multiple sales or a larger order. Then you might want to go to a place like Elance or Rentacoder and submit a bid request. Despite what you think it may not be that expensive. As a plus, you get to keep the scipt and use it over and over for years to come. If creating something custom does not appeal to you, MyGiftList offers a really simple hosted gift list your webmaster can easily integrate with your shopping cart.

If your store is highly specialized, then being a vendor on a third party wishlist system may not be such a bad idea after all. Besides providing convenience to your end user, many wishlists are also open pages viewable to others without login or restrictions. In a small way, the wish maker actually helps you spread the word about your store. Hey if someone wants it so bad to make it to their wishlist it must be good. And don't forget the linkback too!

What if you're selling an information product or only one product? What about it? There are no rules to say you can't be on somebody's wishlist just because you aren't what most people categorize as an online store. In this case you'd be much better off with a third party system. Come to think of it, I have yet to see an information product with an Add To Wishlist button. Why not? Doesn't hurt to try.

So how do you get started? There are some wishlist sites who will charge you a certain amount of money to be a vendor. Some require partnerships. That might take a bit too much time, resources or just too many hoops to jump through. One of the simplest and most affordable way I know of is to use WishCentral. They have a code generator you can freely use to generate a "Add to Wishlist" button that you can put in your shopping cart. Simple Javascript code, not complicated at all. Even the least experienced of webmasters will know how to cut, paste and publish.

Now you know this, give it a try. Then come back and share with me how the wishlist has worked out for your holiday season sales. I hope your business has the best year ever.