Plan Now to Win This Holiday Season

Smaller retailers can also win by offering more of a personal touch to the online buying experience. In a brick-and-mortar store, salespeople know and understand the products. They interact with shoppers, offer expertise and personalize the shopping experience. There's absolutely no reason an online retailer can’t do the same thing through customized product descriptions, blogs, articles, chat and email exchanges with customers.

Holiday-stressed shoppers often need guidance. A personal touch can go a long way toward closing more sales. If you’re a niche retailer, take it a step further and showcase your expertise online.

Content is Still King
Anyone who was around during the dark ages of the web remembers the mantra “content is king.” Back when we were still connecting on 28.8 dial-up connections and optimizing our sites for Netscape 2.0, it was all about compelling content.

Despite all our whiz-bang Flash and HTML5 sites streaming out to the world over fat pipes and lightning-fast wireless connections, it’s still all about compelling content. You must have great content in the form of superior data to win this holiday season.

“Having the right kind of data is how a retailer can differentiate from the competition,” says Fulmer. “You must have great data if you want to get the premium positions in product search and on comparison shopping engines.”

Search engines like Google and Bing require highly optimized, attribute-rich data feeds in order to deliver accurate, contextual search results that match exactly what the consumer is looking for. Retailers who supply the engines with data feeds based on product search optimization best practices have a significant advantage.

Better data. Contextual data. That’s how you win in the fourth quarter.

Rob Wight is founder and CEO of Channel Intelligence, an e-commerce technology company. Rob can be reached at rob.wight@channelintelligence.com.