Ecommerce Best Practice Tip #4: The right way to do coupon codes

Whenever I see a “Coupon Code” field on an order form, it ticks me off. I feel like I somehow missed the boat. I feel neglected… like there is a priveleged elite who get special deals and I’m on the outside of that circle. My knee-jerk response is to immediately open up a new tab in my web browser and search Google for “coupon code” (or whatever the wording on the form is) along with the name of the retailer. Sometimes I get lucky. For example, when I signed up for VOIP service with Packet8, a quick Google search for “reseller code packet8″ revealed a code that saved me the $20 activation fee. Unfortunately for Packet8, not only did they lose $20 off me, they mistakenly attributed my purchase to a reseller who didn’t rightfully deserve credit for the sale — because of the Reseller Code that I had used. Other times I strike out. If I can’t locate a viable coupon code within about 30 seconds, I’ll give up on my search and begrudgingly complete my purchase, sans coupon code.

I’m not suggesting you abandon the practice of offering coupon codes. Far from it! Coupon codes / discount codes are a great thing to have. All I’m suggesting is a minor tweak that will virtually eliminate the piss-off factor. And here it is…

Where you ask for the Coupon Code, place a small question-mark button or something similar that customers can click on that pops open a window with details on your Coupon Code practices. Explain that sometimes you offer limited-time promotions with particular marketing partners. Perhaps provide an example of a past coupon promotion. (I quite like woot.com’s TAXSUCKS coupon code that waives the $5 shipping fee for Texans, since Woot items shipped to Texas are subject to sales tax.) Offer them an opportunity to start receiving coupon codes. For example, if you sometimes publish coupon codes in your email newsletter, tell them so and invite them to subscribe to your enewsletter. Even have a enewsletter sign-up form right there for them. Console them that they aren’t in possession of a coupon code this time around and encourage them to complete the purchase anyways. Do it with flair and a sense of humor, and you’ll end up with a happy customer, whether or not they have a coupon code in hand!

Ecommerce Best Practices Tip #3: Develop Your Gimmick

A good ecommerce site sets itself apart from the rest. It’s memorable. It has something special about it. For example, woot.com, the hugely popular online retailer, has a very clever gimmick of selling only one product per day, at an incredible price, and selling that product until midnight or until it runs out of stock, whichever comes first. Sometimes their product of the day is a “Bag o’ Crap” — a mystery assortment of items for $1 that for some lucky customers may include high ticket items like a 61″ TV.

Our client SteveSpanglerScience.com has a gimmick of podcasting a video every week of a very entertaining science experiment conducted by science toy inventor Steve Spangler and televised that Monday on NBC Channel 9 News in Denver.

Develop a gimmick that you can “own”. Be a “purple cow.” It could be as simple as an irreverrent style to the copy on your site (like woot.com). Here’s an example of the woot.com style that you can’t help but love:

We’re talking Led Zeppelin quality at a Def Leppard price. Or maybe more like Page & Plant quality, because the receiver lacks EQ, tone controls, and an AM/FM tuner. But hey, one man’s necessities are another man’s frills, and we’re sure there are enough cheapskates in the latter category who will gladly take a system like this for $75 without asking a lot of pesky questions.

Got any other examples of ecommerce sites with a great gimmick? Or do you have a gimmick yourself that’s been successful?

Ecommerce Best Practice Tip #1: Where to send your visitors after they click “Add To Cart”

When someone clicks on the “Add to Cart” button on a product page on your ecommerce site, where should that visitor be directed to? The shopping cart page (the first page of the checkout)? Back to that product page? Somewhere else?

If you send customers back to the product page, you’re wasting their time IMHO. It’s redundant. Once I’ve added the product to my cart, I don’t need to read about that product again. I’m ready to move on.

So if you don’t take them back to the product page, then where? A great many sites send shoppers to the shopping cart. On the face of it, that makes good sense. If they are finished shopping, it saves them a step. Their order is in front of them to review. However it doesn’t compel them to do more shopping (unless you include upsell/cross sell opportunities on the cart page, which we at Netconcepts typically do when we build ecommerce sites).

Ideally, I’d suggest having a combo page, where their shopping cart contents is displayed along with recommendations on additional products to buy. Prominently feature upsells/cross-sells specific to the products in the cart. But also include unrelated products, like: “What’s hot”, “Clearance items”, “New in stock”, “Employee picks” etc. And if you have some profile data on the shopper, include product recommendations that are based on their profile.

If you look at how Amazon.com does it, they send you to a page where further product upsells/cross-sells and offers like “Save $30 instantly with the Amazon.com Visa Card” take center stage, and a mini-cart is displayed in the right-hand column. That’s the sort of combo page I’m talking about, except I prefer giving more emphasis to the cart contents than Amazon.

Any other ecommerce sites doing a particularly clever job of compelling online shoppers to spend more when they “Add to Cart”? Post a comment!

E-commerce Best Practice Tip #2 – Build confidence and trust with your visitors

I never quite understood the reason for posting a sticker in plain view on your home page saying that your site is “hacker safe” (like this site does). Why would you remind your visitor that there are hackers out there chomping at the bit to get at their credit card numbers? I only see this as a misguided attempt to build trust. 

On the other hand, having a security seal graphic with a checkmark or padlock on it saying that you use 128 bit encryption is probably a good idea. Padlock or award/seal-of-approval imagery will make people feel more warm-and-fuzzy than seeing the word “hacker”, IMHO. 

Another thing I like to see that builds trust is a prominently positioned link to your Privacy Policy page with a little bit of verbiage around it summarizing that under no circumstances will you share their personal information with third parties and inviting them to read the full policy. 

Here’s a website’s privacy statement that stood out for me, for its simplicity as well as its sincerity:

Our privacy policy is simple: When you give us your email address, we’re not going to sell it or give it to anyone for any reason. Period. No “partners”, no “associates”, no “special offers”, none of that malarkey. … That’s it. Spam sucks and we’re not about to add to it.

A link to your Privacy Policy with accompanying comforting verbiage should be placed on every page of your site where you request information from them, for example on your E-newsletter Sign-Up page, on your Create an Account page, and on your Checkout. 

Another thing that builds trust and gives your visitor a sense of comfort are clues that you are not just a faceless website but a group of real human beings. So, include staff photos on your About Us page, publish your physical as well as mailing address on your Contact Us page, and have a blog where one or more of your employees share their thoughts, ideas and opinions for the benefit of customers and visitors. For example, on our client’s e-commerce site, SteveSpanglerScience.com, you will see prominently positioned in the top right a picture of the founder, Steve Spangler, with an invitation to visit his blog. Fully 13% of purchasers at some point through the sales process visit his blog, either initially by finding his blog through the search engines, or by visiting his blog once they have already started shopping.

5 Tips for Multichannel Retailers Entering the Blogosphere

I was interviewed for a piece that just came out in Multichannel Merchant magazine called Defending yourself against the blogs. I contributed some tips for multichannel retailers who are considering blogging. Here’s the full version of my tips (In the published article, my comments were edited down for space):

1. Create a “safe haven” to experiment with blogging. Set up a private blog on your intranet or extranet, or start a blog that’s password-protected. Then offer access to that test to a selected audience. That will give your inexperienced bloggers comfort because they won’t have having to worry that all of your customers, competition, and the media are watching their every move. They’re trying to find your feet, so help them feel safe while they’re doing it.

2. Decide on a permanent home for your blog. The web address you choose for your blog should be one that you will be happy with for years to come. Remember the early days of the commercial Internet, and many a business card included an earthlink.net or aol.com email address? It made it very painful to switch email providers. (I know people that to this day still pay their AOL subscription only because they don’t want to lose their long-standing email address.) Similarly, it will become difficult to switch blog services if you allow the service to be part of your URL. For example, ehobbies.blogs.com, backcountryblog.blogspot.com, and sethgodin.typepad.com are all examples of blogs that are forever wedded to their blog platform – for better or for worse! If they switch platforms, all the links they’ve earned will be unavailable to their new blog. Links are the lifeblood of your search engine visibility, so the significance of this cannot be overstated.

   You may want to utilize the domain name of your online store (e.g. blog.ice.com). Resist the temptation! In most cases, your blog will be more successful in acquiring links from other bloggers by being at an arm’s length from your storefront, in other words by having a unique domain name (e.g. www.justaskleslie.com). Let me supply a hypothetical example. If a life insurance company has a blog about health and wellness and it’s at www.stayinghealthy.com, then that will most likely garner many more links (and consequently superior search engine rankings) than one at blog.lifeinsuranceco.com – particularly if the former isn’t too much of a hard sell for its life insurance products. (Remember, mastering the soft sell is the name of the game in the blogosphere.)

   This may seem like an oversimplification, since I haven’t discussed the branding implications, but I believe the “link-ability” of the blog is what will give your blog a long productive life in the blogosphere.

   Once you’ve settled on a URL for your blog, publish something at that URL straight away. Even if it’s merely some “Coming Soon” verbiage. This will help you establish a history for your new blog site and will help you avoid the “Google Sandbox” when the time comes for you to launch your blog for real. The Google Sandbox is a term used by us SEOs (search engine optimizers) to refer to the penalty Google applies to new sites with new domain names. Google created this as a deterrent to search engine spammers, but unfortunately legitimate marketers are often caught by this algorithm too.

3. Select a scalable, flexible, and user-friendly blog platform. There are so many solutions to choose from! Some are hosted services, such as TypePad, Blogger, and WordPress.com. Some are software packages that you install on your web server, such as WordPress, Drupal or Movable Type. Rather than pour over comparison charts, my advice is simply to go with WordPress (the software package, not to be confused with the hosted service at WordPress.com). WordPress is free, so the price is right. It’s highly configurable, since it’s “open source” and has a plethora of free, useful plugins written for it (I’ve compiled a list of my favorites). And it’s got all the functionality you’d ever need, all wrapped up in an easy-to-use interface. After I and my team at Netconcepts did extensive research on blogging packages, we came to the conclusion that WordPress really is the best.

4. Decide on a posting schedule. Try to post at least three times per week. Allow several hours per week for this. I typically spend 2 to 3 hours per week blogging. Don’t hire a ghostwriter for your blog, or you’ll get slammed by bloggers for lack of transparency (an unwritten rule in the blogosphere). As far as retaining readers, recency is more important than frequency. A couple weeks of inactivity makes the reader feel like nobody’s home. Conversely, having the latest post be only a day old makes the blog appear “fresh”. Personally, I don’t like keeping RSS feeds in my newsreader that haven’t had recent activity.

5. Get respected bloggers on your side. Building relationships with respected bloggers is absolutely key. Not only will they be more likely to link to you, but they will also offer advice and bolster your “street cred.” Posting thoughtful comments on their blogs is only the first step: do it enough and you may get on their radar, but it’s not enough. Attend blogger conferences like BlogOn and Blog Business Summit and meet bloggers in person. Keep the dialogue going through email and through phone or Skype conversations. Become an evangelist for businesses blogging and you will really get them on-side.

   Don’t be afraid to enlist the help of an expert. Many highly regarded bloggers are available for paid consulting. I’d also suggest you work with a web designer who’s very familiar with WordPress (assuming that’s the blog software you decide on). That way they aren’t learning on your dime, and they aren’t trying to steer you towards an inferior package because they are more familiar with it.

Competitive analysis critical to SEO success

Understanding your competitors — their strategy, their tactics, their level of success, etc. — is crucial to the success of your SEO initiatives. I’m not just talking about your traditional competitors, I’m referring to the other sites occupying spots in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for keywords that you are targeting.

Many free competitive analysis tools are out there, but you have to know where to look for them. One of my favorite SEO blogs (Stuntdubl) offers a veritable Home Depot of such tools, at Mr. Ploppy’s Monday Tool List.

It’s a bit like walking into a DIY store and being faced with an overwhelming array of options. What is the right tool for the job?

Here’s a sampling of some of the SEO tools that I use for competitive analysis and what I specifically use them for:

• URL Checker, Product Page Checker — to check saturation (# of pages indexed)
• PageRank Lookup, PageRank Search, Webmaster Eyes, SEO-Links — to run bulk checks of PageRank scores, to analyze PageRank flow
• Neat-o — to review anchor text of inbound links
• Link Checker, Yahoo Site Explorer — to check link popularity and review inbound links
• Alexa — to check Alexa Rank and review traffic trends on someone’s site
• What’s That Site Running — to determine what server software a site is running
• Check Server Headers — to see what type of redirect (301 or 302) is being used; to see if a 404 is being served when it’s supposed to be, etc.
• Keyword Ranking Tool — to track positions in the SERPs

Best Googler Blogs

It is great that there are Googlers (Google employees) out there blogging — sharing their thoughts, ideas and commentary with the rest of the world (including us SEOs!). But most of the stuff just isn’t of any value to anyone but their friends and family. I could care less that they went on a hike or that their cat just had kittens.

There’s the obviously Google corporate blogs like Inside AdSense and Inside AdWords (and no I’m not counting the self-congratulatory corporate spin machine, er, I mean the “Official Google Blog” of the PR dept.) that are really valuable and worth reading by us SEOs. And then there are the hidden gems — individual Googlers speaking their mind on whatever’s important or interesting to them — on their own personal blogs.

I’ve done a bit of digging, because the list of Googler blogs on the Official Google Blog is woefully incomplete. Thankfully, Googlers tend to link to other Googlers, so it didn’t take too much detective work to find most of their blogs. So, without any further ado, here is my list of my top 10 favorite Googler blogs (from the standpoint of an SEO):

1. Matt Cutts — Duh, of course! Matt’s blog rocks!
2. crazybob.org — Some good stuff for technoweenies intermixed with baby photos (move those to another blog please, Bob!)
3. persistent.info — All technoweenie, all the time!
4. massless — Lots of noise to wade through, with the occasional gem like this one
5. snarfed.org — Their excellent gmail vs pine post was recently slashdotted and it brought their blog’s server down. A nice problem to have.
6. Xenomachina — I’m really into Firefox, so his excellent Firefox annoyances post alone earned him a spot on this list.
7. Ego Food — Chris recently posted to his blog a link to download a free copy of his latest book, Open Sources 2.0. Way to share, Chris!
8. What is left? — I really like Chris’ book recommendations (listed in the right-hand column). I agree, Freakonomics is awesome! Also, his Yahoo for lunch! post made for a fun read.
9. techwalla — Not too much here, just stuff about two projects he’s made available (Tiny Gus and PartyChat). Akshay actually has two blogs. His other one was kinda interesting too, but nothing really relevant for SEOs there.
10. shellen dot com — This Google Reader project manager makes it onto my list out of sheer staying power. He’s been blogging since July 2000! Jason also keeps an interesting collection of links in his link blog (on the right-hand column).

And the “Nonstarter Award” for Googler blogs goes to…
The Coincidental Life of a Non-Actor — This is so bad I felt I needed to nofollow the link. (Sorry, Steven, but I just can’t “vouch for” your lame blog and pass it PageRank. I’m sure you understand…)

If you want ALL the Googler blogs (cat blogs and all) in one place, then head over to Googlers’ Blogs where they offer a heap of Googlers’ blogs syndicated onto a single web page and into a single RSS feed.

Happy reading!