Welcome back to the third and final part of our guide on how to setup your online store.
In part one, we discussed getting your store up & running and filling it with simple products. In part two, we covered how to configure your print, package & custom photography items for sale.
In this installment, we’ll cover how to take advantage of all the bells & whistles your store provides to run sales, offer coupons & free shipping, sell gift cards, track your sales, and run reports on orders and inventory.
Let’s jump in!
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Coupons & Sales
Periodically you may want to run sales to pique the attention of new customers and bring back old clients back into your store.
You have a TON of options to run sales & offer coupons exactly the way you want to.
You can see the flexibility we’ve built into the system to have percent-off sales, dollar-off sales, and “BOGO” sales.
This means you have the freedom to run sales any way you choose. For example, you can offer:
- 20% off your entire order
- $10 off orders over $50
- $5 off this one item only!
- Buy One Get One 25% Off
- 30% off ALL SHOES!
- LIMITED TIME coupons (only the first 10 get it!)
- Offer good on Valentine’s day ONLY!
- and more!
Then you can share the coupon codes on social media and in direct emails to your customers.
Free Shipping
You also have the ability to offer Free Shipping with a coupon.
Which brings up a good point… which is more enticing to your customers? Discounts or Free shipping?
As it turns out, it depends on the clients you’re trying to reach.
While discounts will turn the head of most shoppers, people 45+ prefer free shipping. People under 45 prefer a discount. And people 24-34 are ONLY interested in money-off deals.
(Not seeing the FREE SHIPPING coupon? Set up a shipping option first… then you’ll see the option.)
Sales Campaigns
Coupons are one-time and person-specific. Unless a customer knows about the deal, they won’t be able to cash in on the savings.
To put things on sale for EVERYONE, you can run a campaign.
You can use campaigns with a high degree of flexibility, putting one item, multiple items, or any category of products, services, packages or prints on sale.
If you do, the items in your store will show up with a cool sale marker, to let people know what’s on special.
You can also TAG your sale items, and make a page just for things on sale, as we discussed in Part 1 of this guide.
It’s a neat marketing tactic that can get attention if you share your sale page elsewhere on your site… like via a banner or list item graphic. (some examples)
Gift Cards
You can sell gift cards on your site for customers to purchase. That’s under SELL ONLINE >> GIFT CARDS.
Add a gift card page to make that available to your clients on the front end.
You could also use gift cards as a marketing tactic. Maybe you offer a complimentary gift card to customers that make purchases over $200. Or you can hold a giveaway!
You can make your own gift cards and give them the code. When your gifted customer checks out, they can enter the code to receive their gift.
You can add & subtract money to their card easily from the backend.
Sales Tracking & Reports
Notifications
When you make a sale, we notify you in a few ways so you can quickly fill your orders.
- You’ll get an email in your inbox alerting you of the sale.
- You’ll get a notification in your PhotoBiz website (a little red “1” on the bell icon in the top right of your control panel).
- And if you have the free PhotoBiz ToGo App, you’ll get a notification on your phone.
Dashboard
When you go to your Ecommerce tracking dashboard, you’ll see all your sales at a glance. Your sales totals are broken out by month and by product.
When tracking your sales over a period of time, you can start to notice sales trends in your business. Maybe the summer is your peak time for shooting, but product sales really pick up in late fall.
You can ID popular products, and the ones that are REALLY making you money (not always the same thing!)
Reports
For your bookkeeping needs, you can also run various kinds of reports to print or export from the TRACKING >> REPORTS tab.
Pick your date and run the type of report you need.
Sales, Customers, Payments, Event Orders, Invoices, and year-end reports for your tax purposes.
Saved Carts & Favorites
If a customer has logged in and saved favorites – or added items to their cart but not yet paid – you can see their abandoned carts.
Look at Holly here, who was going to buy a big order, but then chickened out.
Inventory Management
We covered stock tracking briefly in Part 1, but I want to come back to it for a minute and add some more options that you have, and explain how it can help your workflow.
Stock tracking is key for people who have physical products to sell, sitting on shelves or in boxes, closets…. under your bed….
You don’t want to sell more than you can deliver. So turning on stock tracking and keeping count of your inventory is super helpful.
You can set LOW STOCK markers on individual products. BUT you can also set a global low stock threshold under SETTINGS >> GENERAL >> STOCK SETTINGS.
Used together, you can set your global low stock setting to give yourself a standard re-ordering buffer. But if something needs to be tweaked, you can set a custom low stock mark for each SKU that needs individual attention.
So if you know your hand-made fancy cheese graters take 6 weeks to arrive from Switzerland, you might want to set the bar a little higher so you don’t run out in the meantime (or end up with a whole trunk full of ‘em).
That brings us to STOCK REPORTING.
You can see your entire inventory at a glance by clicking TRACKING >> STOCK.
Here you can quickly add or remove inventory, and see which items need to be topped up. Pretty handy.
There we have it! We’ve gone through all about how to set up a flexible, robust online store that simplifies your workflow.
Thanks for sticking with us as we explained how to configure your complete ecommerce solution. From selling complex items to keeping track of sales and marketing your business!
If you have questions about anything we covered (or DIDN’T cover!) in this 3-part guide, let us know! We’d be happy to expand and help you build your successful ecommerce site.
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