Tips for Offering an Online Wishlist or Gift Registry

Over the past few years, the online gift market has been growing rapidly. Big name online retailers are taking advantage by offering special gift options for their customers such as gift registries and wishlists. Ecommerce features like these are gaining popularity because shoppers enjoy the convenience it offers. Because online shoppers are becoming accustomed to having such features, it is becoming more and more critical for smaller ecommerce businesses to do the same in order to compete.  

A gift registry is a service that allows customers to pick out products from your store in order for their friends and family to buy them on special occasions. Gift registries was once only associated with weddings, bridal showers and baby showers. Recently people are starting to use gift registries for a host of special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries and graduation. Your products don't necessarily have to be related to weddings or babies in order for you to offer an online store gift registry. Being able to use a gift registry makes life easier not only for the person giving the gift, but also the person receiving the gift. It takes the stress out of the gift buying process, the gift giver has an easy time selecting the perfect gift knowing that the recipient will like it.

A store wishlist is a service that enables customers to mark down products from your store that they like, but do not plan on buying immediately. Wishlists are a good option to have for your online store, because people who visit your site normally will not buy something right away. They can always mark down products they like and come back to it at a later time. As the business owner, you should make use of the useful information gathered from your customer's online store wishlist to remind them of products that they like but have not yet bought, promote related products that they might be interested in or inform them of discounts for products already on their list. All these techniques can be easily implemented as long as you offer this feature on your ecommerce site. You can increase sales revenue by simply reminding people to check out your products again.

There are several advantages of having gift registries and/or wishlists. First, it's essentially a free form of advertising. Think about it, if a fan of your site sets up a store gift registry or store wishlist and sends it to all of his or her friends who are unfamiliar with your business, they get a chance to see a selection of your products. This is an effective feature for acquiring new traffic, these new visitors have the potential to become new customers. It's not enough that gift registries and wishlists help drive more sales, they are also effective for building customer loyalty. You have the ability to offer them things that they most likely would not have paid attention to. These features are useful for retaining a customer's interest in your products and getting them to refer their friends. Ultimately you can use the information gathered from wishlists and gift registries to find out more information about your customers, what they like and don't like. Find out which products are the most popular and which ones are worth promoting. Use these statistics to improve your online store and offer even more value to your customers.

Having an online store gift registry and online store wishlist is just the beginning. To really transform it into a profitable tool, you have to figure out creative ways to get more visitors to use it. By helping your customers get the most out of these handy options, you help yourself by outperforming your competition. For example, depending on what kind of products you sell, your store gift registry will only be able to appeal to a certain category of people. Find out where these people typically go online to get what they're looking for. Become active in forums, create relationships with bloggers and join social networking groups that you think this kind of shopper belongs to. A good way to promote your online store wishlist option is to teach your visitors all the cool ways they can use it, such as adding it to their Facebook, adding it to events on sites like Evite or get them to include it on Websites like Elfster over the holidays.



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The key to having a well integrated online store gift registry or online store wishlist for your e-commerce business is to have an ecommerce solution that has all the right tools to get it to work seamlessly with your online store. With the right tools, the customer can enjoy this feature without any added hassle and you can watch your sales grow without doing any extra work.

Core Commerce is a full service all-in-one hosting, design, and marketing software made specifically for e-commerce businesses. You can set up your store in minutes, and with powerful tools to help with not only gift registries and wishlists, but also SEO, product marketing and mobile commerce, it's no wonder why it has been rated one of the best e-commerce solutions. Click here to try it absolutely free for 15 days, no credit card required!