Happy New Year to everyone! Hope you had a great holidays.

Online shopping is such a wonderful innovation for me that I am absolutely hooked to it. In fact, I did almost all of my Christmas shopping online. In doing so, I noticed some little things that some retailers may overlook, but could help online sellers build customer confidence and improve bottomlines:

1. Be consistent in naming your products. Keep the names of your products consistent in your webpages and invoices. For example, if the product’s name on your website is “Golden Pearls”, don’t call it “Yellow Pearls” in your invoice. Doing so can confuse the customers and they may question whether the product shipped to them is the same as the product they ordered.

2. Ship the product using the shipping method you charged them. If the customer pays $24 for the shipment of a jewelry set via FedEx, ship it via FedEx. Don’t ship it via USPS Priority that costs only $7. While the shipping fee may be high, the customer agreed to it — and hence expected to get what they paid for. They may be on the lookout for the package waiting for the FedEx truck to pull in, only to get frustrated when the FedEx truck does not because they don’t have the package! Customers will feel shortchanged if you change your shipping mechanism and opt for the cheaper one — without informing the customer or reimbursing them for the price differential.

3. Check the products you ship. During crunchtime when there’s so many items to ship, it can be easy to get confused. But make an effort to check and double check if the items in the package coincide with the order. Imagine the frustration of the customer who ordered Black Akoya pearls only to receive White Akoya pearls because the retailer failed to double check the order. It’s a lot more hassle to arrange for the return of the product and added cost to the retailer to ship the correct order (if the customer does not cancel the order).