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.

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.