SOPA: What you can do about it

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Dinesh

SOPA. You might not have heard of it yet, but it’s a clear and present danger to the Internet that we love and have built our businesses on.

If you’re not sure what all the fuss is about, check out this video [via BoingBoing]

To show our support for the anti-SOPA movement, we’ve moved all our domains off GoDaddy, who helped to draft SOPA. (If you were wondering, we’ve decided to switch to the quite excellent Gandi.net.)

But that’s not all. We also want to show our support for the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) efforts against SOPA. They’ve done tremendous work in bringing this issue to light and we’d like to help out. So till January 24th, if you sign up for a ReferralCandy account using the link below, we’ll donate 60% of your first month’s bill to the EFF. You’ll also get store credit for the remaining 40% for showing your support.

To take part, simply sign up using this link: http://www.referralcandy.com/pricing/?support=NOSOPA

Some other companies involved in the cause are Zopim and UserVoice. You should go check them out.

If you’d like to get even more involved, it’s not too late. Here are some other things you can do:

Schedule a call with your house representative (via Tumblr)
Send an email to your members of Congress
Donate directly to the Electronic Frontier Foundation

It’s time to act. Protect the ideals that the Internet was founded on and urge everyone you know to do the same.

Can F-commerce Change The Face of Retail?

Posted on December 20, 2011 by ReferralCandy

There’s been a lot of chatter about how Facebook has an opportunity to change the face of retail. With 1 in every 6 seconds on the Internet spent on Facebook, selling your goods where everyone is hanging out should be a no-brainer right?

And so there’s been bunch of ways you can set up a page or use third-party app to set up your Facebook storefront. Shoppers can check out your wares and pay directly for items via PayPal without ever leaving Facebook.

But it turns out that 89% of people have never bought via Facebook and 44% have no interest in doing so. The truth seems to be that not too many people actually go on Facebook with the goal of buying something online. They just want to hang out with their friends. There’s also the inevitable question of privacy on the platform with 75% of users still being bothered by it.

So if you’re wondering if there’s anything from the marriage of Facebook and commerce, or F-commerce, that you can leverage, all is not lost. The trick is not to bring your store to Facebook but to bring Facebook to your store. You want to get your existing customers to spread the word about your store to their friends. And with over 800 million active users, it just happens that Facebook is where you customers are hanging out with their friends. So how to spread the word? Here are a couple of ideas.

Location check-ins via Facebook and other sites like Foursquare allow you to add a social dimension when customers come to your store. You can get the number of check-ins to go up by giving rewards to those who happen to drop by. Last year, popular brand Gap had a promo wherein a shopper could go home with a brand new pair of jeans just by checking in to one of the Gap stores.

Since check-ins appear as updates on the user’s wall, they act as virtual shout-outs to his or her connections about the brand.

You can even add Facebook Places and Facebook Deals into the mix. This past Valentine’s day, Debenhams gave treats to their “social shoppers”. The first 10 people who checked-in at a Debenham’s boutique got special packages, and the first 1000 got free cosmetics.

Probably one of the most creative in-store executions to date is Macy’s “magic” 72-inch touchscreen mirror. The magic mirror allows customers to virtually fit dresses by super-imposing apparel onto their reflections. Augmented reality meets social media as the experience can be shared on Facebook, giving customers the option to ask friends if the outfits suit them before making the purchase.

So the jury is still out on whether there’s a payoff in setting up a storefront on your Facebook page. But there are a good many ways that Facebook can help you get the word out about your store to your customers’ friends. And with many brands already using Facebook as a way to get closer to their audience, there are a lot of places to look for inspiration. All it takes is a little guts and creativity, and you’re ready to take the plunge.

Image credit: Gap Free Jeans Giveaway Event

How to Remove Old Products From Your eCommerce Website

Posted on December 14, 2011 by ReferralCandy

If you are running an eCommerce business, you’ll eventually have to deal with products that change, go out of stock, or get discontinued.

In this article we will be looking at how to best handle each of those situations from an SEO perspective.

How to Deal With Products That Are Out of Stock

Products go out of stock for various reasons, you sell out of them, encounter supply problems from the manufacturer or vendor, or develop a change in style.

If this is a product you will be getting back in stock and selling in the future, the ideal solution is to keep the page in place so it stays in the search engine index still ranks and brings traffic.

However you do have to consider the end user experience as well. If you can take orders and ship the products when it comes back in stock, keep the page in the search engine index.

If the product is out of stock and is coming back but you can’t take orders, you should show an “out of stock” or similar message on the page. Try to capture an email or other contact information, so you can let the customer know when the item is back in stock.

The ultimate goal in this situation is to keep the products in the search engine index, and driving traffic, so you don’t lose your rankings when the product comes back in stock.

How to Deal With Products that Change

In some cases, products will change or upgrade, such as the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. How you handle these products from a search engine perspective depends on the search volume for the term, and if you have any old stock to sell. If you have old stock to sell, keep the page as it is currently. To improve the user experience you may want to provide a link directly to the new product for people who are looking for that item. If you don’t have any old stock to sell but the page is still bringing traffic from search engines, you will want to keep the page, provide a link to the new product, and tell the customer the product is no longer available. The goal here is to try and transition customers who are looking for the old product into customers for the new product, without losing any search engine traffic. Eventually the search volume will drop off and you will want to remove the product.

How to Remove Old Products from A Search Engine

When you have a product that is no longer available, you can’t take orders for it, and it doesn’t get any search volume, you will want to remove it from the search engines. In a post panda world you don’t want to have a site that is larger than it needs to be, cluttered with products you no longer sell. These extra pages weaken the website as a whole, spreading link equity and trust to pages that dont convert into customers and sales. If there is a replacement product, you’ll want to serve 301 redirect from the old product page to the new product page. If there is no replacement product, you’ll want to serve a 301 redirect to the category or department page. If there is no category or department page, you’ll want to redirect to the home page.

The last thing you want to do is let the page lead you to an error page or a page that serves a 404 error/response code. If the page has any inbound links serving a 404 page, it lets that link value evaporate and that certainly doesn’t help you at all. If you have this condition for a lot of products or even a majority of products, it will be seen as a signal of low quality by the search engines. You can check the response code with a header response checker.

In Summary:

Try to take orders or keep up product pages for products that are coming back in stock.
For old products where the model has updated, keep up the page while there is stock and search volume. Link this page to the new product.
For old products with no back stock and/or no search volume, issue a 301 redirect to the most appropriate new page.
Do not let the expired product pages serve a 404 error code.
Use a header response tool to check that you are issuing the proper response code.
Having site with a lot of products you don’t sell, can’t take orders on, or are discontinued can be seen as a signal of low quality by search engines

Image credit: Shutterstock/Andrea Zabiello

Free E-commerce Stock Photos For You!

Posted on December 6, 2011 by ReferralCandy

Seasons greetings! We’re happy to announce that we’re releasing some free e-commerce stock photographs for you to use. The photos can be found on our photo gallery and are released under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike License (free to use with the proper attribution).

Why did we do this? Well, Christmas is just around the corner and we wanted to do something nice to celebrate the spirit of giving. At the same time, we wanted to thank our loyal customers for supporting us throughout the year and the folks in the e-commerce industry who helped us along the way. We know how difficult it is to find e-commerce related stock photos and thought we’d do something to help with that.

So do check out our e-commerce stock photos and put them to good use! As a teaser, here are some of the awesome photographs from the set.

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Monthly Archives: December 2011