Giving customers another luxury: convenience

Customer Registration is a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions feature that offers customers a better shopping experience. It gives consumers the option to shop as registered customers–making checkout, reordering, and order tracking easier.

Merchants can allow guest checkout or require registration, and customize their Customer Registration content and design–giving them better control over their store's checkout flow.

"Customers can check out faster, without having to re-enter all their information every single time," Richards says. "In our industry, customers are very brand loyal and fragrance loyal. Customer Registration makes it easier for customers to simply log in, see their previous order history and make a purchase decision right there."

Which explains the high adoption rate by customers on Scents & Sprays. "We run regular surveys," states Richards, "and our customers tell us they like the easier checkout, seeing their previous orders and checking their order status."

AT A GLANCE

• Who: Scents & Sprays
• Product Used: Yahoo! Merchant Solutions
• Highlighted Feature: Customer Registration
• Results: Scents & Sprays has over 500 paying registered customers. Among these customers, Scents & Sprays saw increases in average orders per customer (11%), average revenue per customer (17%) and average repeat orders per customer (72%) as compared to non-registered customers over the same period.

PRODUCT MODULE

• Customer Registration

This feature benefits both consumers and merchants. It gives customers a faster, easier way to check out and reorder products. And it provides merchants with key insights that help them identify their most valuable customers.

Burning the benefit candle at both ends

Customer Registration benefits merchants as well as customers. For starters, it encourages reordering. "Customers tend to order the same things over and over," Richards observes. "And the fact that you have the ability to reorder with just one click makes it really easy."

Customer Registration also helps e-commerce stores in an unexpected way–by making the phone ring less frequently. When consumers can easily track their orders, they're less likely to call, which saves merchants time. Kevin Richards has noticed the difference. "Customer Registration has made the number of phone calls with where-is-my-order questions go way down."

Giving merchants key insights into customers

Customer Registration gives merchants detailed transaction information so they can identify, segment, and market to their most valuable customers. The Customer Manager tool filters customer data by total orders, total order value, purchase date, products purchased and other attributes.

"I like to arrange it by total order value," Richards says. "That tells me who my best customers are in terms of revenue and allows me to look at their buying behavior and get some anecdotal evidence of what is happening on our website."

Insight provided by the Customer Manager tool makes it easier to drive sales through targeted marketing campaigns. If, for example, a merchant wanted to promote a new accessory to customers who had previously purchased the product it complements, they could generate a mailing list from the Customer Manager then send those customers a single-use coupon to encourage purchases.

Results are impacted by a number of factors. Your results may be different. Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. PC-0511-4317