Why give away margin to coupon affiliates?

by Jon West on January 25, 2012 10:59 pm

You hate when it happens but this scenario is all too familiar:

A customer is ready to check out, spies the enticing “enter coupon code” box, then scurries off to Google only to return through an affiliate website with coupon in tow. It’s a double-whammy. You’re giving up margin for a coupon that wasn’t earned and to the affiliate who is basically a middle man not offering much value. The equation just doesn’t make sense.

What does make sense is rewarding customers with a coupon for a social action — a share, a tweet, or a Like, etc.. These actions build your brand, drive new traffic, and ultimately sales. You also cut out the pointless affiliate pass-throughs.

We’ve made it simple to add promotions per sharing source (maybe tweets are worth more than emails for you, or a Like even).

After you’ve added a promotion, you can toggle on/off the promo callout (currently seeking patent protection) that’s displayed next to the sharing button. This preempts customers who see the button to share for a coupon rather than leave on your cart page to search for one.  We’d suggest leaving the promo callout on as it really does entice customers to click through.

We think you’ll agree that rewarding customers for referals makes more sense than rewarding coupon aggregators for nothing.

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Why should your shop use Product Schema?

by Jon West on January 25, 2012 10:59 pm

Standards are good.  In eCommerce land there’s a standard that I see a ton of shops not using. It’s called Product Schema.  All you do is add simple tags to different elements on your product pages like the Title, Description, Price, and Reviews.  This lets websites that support Product Schema know what’s what.

OK, so let’s say you spent 10 minutes today to integrate this.  What would it do for you?  How about Rich Snippets in Google Search Results:

Which do you think a customer is more likely to click on?  We’re big believers in more free traffic. Every little bit helps in online retail.

AddShoppers uses it to pull the right product data for our widgets:

 If Product Schema isn’t present, we default to the page title for the product name and cry a little inside.

Here are the Product Schema tags you should be using:

1. name
2. description
3. image
4. productID
5. price
6. stock status
7. reviews
8. availability
9. brand

 

Moral of the blog post?   Get your developers to spend a few minutes updating your product pages today.  You can test everything with Google’s Rich Snippets Tool.

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Why hello there, World.

by Jon West on January 25, 2012 10:58 pm

Well, after months of development and tweaking, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be to launch publicly.

So what have we built?

A free social sharing platform built for retailers that increases sharing with incentives and allows merchants to measure ROI by tracking sharing to actual conversions.

For example, you can add a simple promotion that incentivizes every tweet with a $5 off coupon (and yes, a Facebook Like).  Then you can track all the shares and clicks to see the actual impact.  Customers can easily see the incentive for sharing with our Social Promo Callouts™. Reward customers for spreading your brand and discourage them from searching for coupons that cost you an affiliate commission.

You can even add coupons to Facebook Likes, Tweets, or Google +1s.  Sharing has been an afterthought to this point for most retailers.  Just slapping a Like button or a general sharing button just isn’t enough any more.  There’s no good reason for customers to click and there’s no good way for you to analyze what’s going on.  Until now.

Any questions?  We’re happy to help!

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Go time…

by admin on January 11, 2012 7:44 pm

Happy New Year!

Now that the holiday rush is over, it’s time to get your site in shape for Q4 2012. Implementing AddShoppers should be one of the simplest and most effective things you can do this year.   Most retailers just put random sharing buttons on their product pages without a second thought.  Now you can increase sharing and see powerful analytics about who’s sharing what and where.  You’re welcome!

Here’s what we’ve done lately:

1. Revamped widget and admin design.  Clean and simple!
2. Added StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Wishpot, and Kaboodle
3. Moved to a CDN so our widget loads as fast as possible
4. Implemented Uservoice to manage all issues and feedback
5. Ability to track goals for a specified page instead of just your checkout success page
6. Tons of tweaks and fixes

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