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aheadWorks Recommends How to Increase Revenue and Sell More During a Hot Holiday Season

Holiday Sales

Holidays are still in full swing even though Christmas is over. This is also a hot time for online stores, because, as practice shows, thirty one days of December may double sales and make the whole year prosperous in terms of revenue growth.

Consider this freshly delivered fact: retail eCommerce spending in the U.S. for the first 44 days of the November–December 2012 holiday season was $33.8 billions. It means merchants should hurry up in adopting all necessary improvements to gather a high-dollar crop.

Let’s examine how owners can multiply their sales by upgrading their stores with new selling features.



5 main features to improve store sales rate



1. Allowing customers to subscribe to products on a constant basis

It’s great when customers can easily subscribe to products instead of making single purchases. It means they become frequent visitors and constant buyers. To make that happen we developed the Subscriptions and Recurring Payments extension.

We’ve enabled merchants to
• specify subscription periods
• offer customers a different price for the first period of the subscription
• work with various payment methods
• configure shipping cost and shipping per product

Lists of subscriptions and subscribers and related statistics are available.


2. Tracking customers with abandoned shopping carts

Users may feel tired, refocus attention on pics with kittens in Internet or simply forget they put items into a shopping cart. How to get customers back? To solve this problem, we came up with the Follow Up Email extension.

It does precisely what should be done in case of abandoned carts. The extension takes care and sends notifications to abandoned cart holders. Users then are able to restore their carts with just one click on the link sent in the email notification.

The main functions of this extension are to improve conversion rates, increase sales with better customer insights, analyze the efficiency of follow-ups and build customer loyalty.


3. Setting a referral system to reward customers for inviting their friends

Viral marketing buzz is in favor these days and we in aheadWorks couldn’t overlook its opportunities for online businesses. We released the Points & Rewards extension that offers the built-in referral system with flexible settings, so that merchants can reward customers for inviting their friends as well as for their referrals purchases.

Module adds a new tab to customer’s account page, so points balance is configurable for every customer on individual basis.


4. Providing customers with affiliate marketing programs

An affiliate program is one of the most powerful ways to promote products online via collecting the network of affiliates and paying them on conversions. Usually a customer follows an affiliate link to a merchant’s website and makes a purchase in accordance with the rules of the campaign, the affiliate is paid.

This is exactly how the Magento Affiliate extension works. It allows building a web of affiliates, which use their visitors to advertise store owner’s products and services.


5. Sharing products and store pages in social services

People spend tremendous amount of time on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit and others. Although selling capabilities of social websites are quite controversial, it’s the place where folks are hanging out (and where traffic comes from) and are prone to purchase impulsively. To attract users to stores, we came up with the Sociable extension.

This add-on allows visitors to share favorite store pages on any social networking site. We included 17 pre-installed services to share links with Magento store. Additionally, merchants can track which products and how many times have been bookmarked.


This list of selling features can be certainly continued. Merchants always need to be creative and risky to try new approaches in engaging their audience. However, using all or several above-mentioned features will definitely change sales statistics and increase incoming store traffic.

Perhaps, you have explored something brand new or want to share your experience in boosting sales? Drop comments under this post and showcase your best practices.