Given that so many one-man Weblogs have optional skins the users can chose to change the color scheme and graphics, one way for online merchants such as Amazon and eBay to bypass the whole Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays controversy is to simply offer a choice of greetings for the month of December.
These sites use cookies to keep track of each customer–for example, whenever I log onto Amazon it says (paraphrasing) “Hi Ed, Welcome Back! (If you’re not Ed, click here.)” So why not put them to work here? Default to “Happy Holidays” and then allow each customer to choose if he or she wants to change it to “Merry Christmas”, “Happy Hanukah”, “Happy Kwanza”, “Happy Eid”, or heck, even “Happy Festivus”. And then have a “Happy TYPE HOLIDAY OF YOUR CHOICE HERE” box for anyone who celibrates a day other than the previous listings to fill in.
If individual Weblogs can personalize the appearance of their sites, this sort of thing should be a no-brainer for large operations with dedicated coding teams. It seems like an easy way to add personalized service, make each customer feel welcome, and avoid being written up in these sorts of articles. It also allows for more personalized gift/shopping suggestions, and creates additional demographic data about the site’s customers.
So what say, fellas?
Update: Welcome Willisms readers–it’s great to make the Carnival of the Classiness again! (Click here to find our first nominated post.)
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