Presenting Gift Options in Ecommerce Checkout

For retailers, there is no better compliment to your brand than someone wanting to give one of your products as a gift. Not only are they purchasing from your store, but they believe someone else will also love your product. Plus, assuming the recipient enjoys the gift, this person may return to your store to buy on their own. It’s the best customer referral you can get.

Merchants want to make the gift checkout process as clear, easy, and fun as possible. In this video, Lauren shares how different stores present gift options. As you’ll see, merchants that add extra features (even small ones!) in the gift checkout really enhance the process.

Transcript: Presenting Gift Options in Ecommerce Checkout

Hi there, I’m Lauren. I’m a conversion specialist here at Command C. And today we are taking a look at gifting options in the checkout.

What are you going to learn? I’m going to be showing you what to consider when you want to offer gifting to your customers. Plus ways that you can make gifting really special for your customers, so that way they have a great gifting experience for their friends and family.

What you need to consider is how you’re going to communicate your gifting options. The wrapping, the notes, the packaging. And then what options are you going to offer? Are you going to offer gift receipts, tag removal, wrapping, messages? And where on your site are you going to offer these gifting options?

The “Do’s” of Gift Options in Checkout

Some do’s when it comes to gifting. You want to always allow custom gift messages. You also want to consider dynamically-changing shipping field labels for gift orders. I’ll show that in a minute. You also want to consider where on your site is best to offer gifting.

You want to test messaging or gifting selection in the product cart, in the checkout. [It’s also smart to] showcase what the gift packaging or gift wrapping is going to look like. Allow your customers to ship to multiple addresses. And make it very clear what gifting options are free and which ones are paid.

Example #1: Bergdorf Goodman Displays Gift Packaging

In the checkout. Here are a few examples of some of these gifting do’s. Here for Bergdorf Goodman, they showcase their product packaging. You can clearly see what your recipient is most likely going to be receiving. You can see that there’s a $7.50 charge here. And you can get free gift packing, if you spend over $500.00.

Example #2: Goldbelly Easily Allows Multiple Shipping Addresses

With Goldbelly, they do a good job of mentioning shipping to multiple addresses. By default it’s to a single address, but you click this link and this new section appears, and then you can ship to multiple, different recipients.

Example #3: Bouqs Clearly Separates Billing and Shipping Addresses

And in this example from Bouqs, they make it clear what fields you are filling out. So you’re not filling out your own name, you’re filling out for your recipient. You’re also not filling out your own address, it’s the address that you want to deliver the gift to. This makes it clear and it reduces any potential errors.

Also, for Bouqs, they make it clear that there is a billing address. If you select a gifting option it is best to have separate shipping and billing addresses, as those are most likely going to be different. The customer is going to fill out their own billing address and then their recipient’s shipping address.

Example #4: Kate Spade Excels with GiftNow Feature

For Kate Spade, they do a good job of offering gifting here in the checkout. If you click this checkbox, it’ll show options for gift boxes and messages, and then you get this little modal here. And you can select a free gift carded message. Or if you want to include gift wrapping, that’s an extra $6.00. Something they could improve here is just showing what the gift wrapping actually looks like.

And a few ways that you can make gifting special for your customers. One example here is GiftNow. This is on Kate Spade. You can select this in the checkout and this allows customers to send their recipient a message. Instead of sending them the actual item, the recipient gets a message of what the customer was going to select for them, and they can either accept it or they can exchange it, and they’re also able to select the right size for them. This ensure that customers are getting their recipient exactly what they want. This is a very cool tool you might want to test on your site.

Example #5: Knack Offers Great Gifting Customization

And you might also want to test different messaging options. Here at Knack, they offer gift message cards and video messages. You can select one or the other, or you can select both of these.

And for their gift messaging, it’s very customizable. This is a lot more customized than I see for most gift messages. You can add images, you can add logos and titles. Down here you can add this floral belly band for an extra $5.00. Very personalized, very customized. Probably will be more memorable, one of the more memorable gift messages that somebody receives from a store. Something else you can consider offering for your customers.

These were just a few examples of offering gifting on your site. Hopefully you got some good ideas that you can test out in your checkout. All right, and thanks for watching, and see you in the next video.