eCommerce SEO for New Products and Seasonal Products
Posted: January 25, 2012 Filed under: SEO 2 Comments »
When you are running and eCommerce website two of the situations you are likely to encounter are how to do SEO for new products and for seasonal products. In this article we will be taking a look at some best practices for both situations. Read the rest of this entry »
eCommerce SEO for Mobile Websites and Mobile apps
Posted: January 17, 2012 Filed under: SEO 8 Comments »
In late 2011 a report was released showing over 90% of mobile eCommerce purchases came from iPhone and iPad devices. For merchants having a moblie website that performs properly and allows consumers to research, shop and complete transactions is really no longer an option but a necessity. How should merchants go from not having a mobile platform to implementing one, should they choose a subdomain, mobile version, or app, and what are the big pitfalls to watch out for. Read the rest of this entry »
SOPA: What you can do about it
Posted: December 30, 2011 Filed under: ecommerce future, ecommerce news 11 Comments »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: December 20, 2011 Filed under: ecommerce future, social media 1 Comment »
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 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.
Image Source: Gap Free Jeans Giveaway Event
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.
How to Remove Old Products From Your eCommerce Website
Posted: December 14, 2011 Filed under: SEO Leave a comment »
When you are running an eCommerce website for any length of time one of the problems you will have to deal with is discontinued products, products that change or products that go out of stock. In this article we will be looking at best practices on how to 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, supply problems from the manufacturer or vendor, or 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 want to serve 301 redirect from the old product page to the new product page. If there is no replacement product you want to serve a 301 redirect to the category or department page. If there is no category or department page you want to redirect to the home page.
The last thing you want to do is let the page go 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 lets that link value evaporate and doesn’t help you. 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.
What are the takeaways from this post:
- 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
photo credit: Shutterstock/Andrea Zabiello
Free E-commerce Stock Photos For You!
Posted: December 6, 2011 Filed under: e-commerce photos 1 Comment »
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.
How to Get Reviews for your eCommerce Store
Posted: November 29, 2011 Filed under: SEO | Tags: reviews 3 Comments »
Getting reviews for your eCommerce store is one of the ways merchants and online retailers can add value and create a point of differentiation to their online store. In this article we’ll be taking a look at ways to get those reviews, how to use them to your advantage and what are some of the dangers. Read the rest of this entry »
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Intermediate eCommerce SEO Tactics
Posted: November 22, 2011 Filed under: SEO Leave a comment »
Once you have eliminated duplicate content and started started link building for your eCommerce site, it’s time to take the next step with intermediate SEO eCommerce tactics. Read the rest of this entry »
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Online Shopping Cart Price Comparison Tool
Posted: November 15, 2011 Filed under: ecommerce solutions 5 Comments »
Being involved in the e-commerce industry, we’re often asked by friends and customers for online shopping cart recommendations. If there happened to be a shopping cart that automagically addressed everyone’s needs, we would refer it immediately. But, if you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that there’s a lot more detail needed before a recommendation can be made.
Which shopping cart you should use depends on the particular situation you’re in. Do you sell products at high volumes and low prices? How much do your customers spend each time they shop at your store? The cost of running an online store can vary largely depending on your answers to these questions and more.
Not being able to resist a good problem, we thought it’d be fun to take a crack at this to see if we could simplify the process of comparing shopping carts. After some in-depth research and late-night pots of coffee, Carty, our shopping cart price comparison tool, was born!
Introducing Carty
Carty is a friendly tool that does the tricky shopping cart platform price calculations for you. It takes in information about your online store, determines the cheapest plan for each platform and spits out a side-by-side breakdown of the costs in each platform.
Carty currently compares 4 platforms (Volusion, Shopify, Bigcommerce and Magento Go). We’ll be adding more platforms when we can, but feel free to contact us if you’d like a specific platform to be included.
Carty also has a helpful FAQ about how it works and a brief rundown of the various fees incurred when running an online store. There are also some links to resources that we thought might be useful.
So go ahead and get your hands dirty with Carty. Find out how much your shopping cart is really charging you and how it affects your margins. And hopefully, it’ll make choosing between shopping cart platforms just that much easier.
The Evolution of Social Networking [Infographic]
Posted: November 8, 2011 Filed under: ecommerce future, social media 1 Comment »Click on the infographic below to view full sized image.
Embed this Infographic using this tag:
<a href="http://blog.referralcandy.com/2011/11/08/the-evolution-of-social-networking-infographic/"><img src="http://images.referralcandy.com/images/the-evolution-of-social-networking-referralcandy-600.jpg" alt="The Evolution of Social Networking" title="The Evolution of Social Networking - Infographic" width="600" height="1987" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.referralcandy.com">ReferralCandy - Customer Referral Programs for Online Stores</a>
Duplicate Content on eCommerce Websites
Posted: November 1, 2011 Filed under: SEO 3 Comments »
When running an eCommerce website one of the issues that creeps in and creates problems is duplicate content. In this post we’ll take a look at duplicate content, the different forms it is most likely to occur in, and how to deal with each of them. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Get Your Products Listed in Google – Use a Crawling Path
Posted: October 10, 2011 Filed under: SEO 4 Comments »
Anyone who runs an online shopping cart knows that one of the first hurdles they have to clear is getting their products in the Google index. However, many shopping carts aren’t designed with SEO or search engine crawling and indexing in mind. In addition, if you have a large number of products or a complicated department structure or hierarchy, this problem can be a real headache. While the best solution is to use a shopping cart that is SEO friendly, fortunately there are workarounds to solve these problems. I like to set up what I call a crawling path to make sure products get indexed quickly. Read the rest of this entry »
India E-commerce Overview [Infographic]
Posted: October 5, 2011 Filed under: ecommerce future, ecommerce news, india ecommerce 12 Comments »Given that the e-commerce market in India has been getting a lot of attention from VCs, we wanted to see what the hype was all about. Here’s what we found. Enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »
