As customer reviews become more and more common on ecommerce sites, we can expect innovations to emerge in design, usability and quality.

It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on Amazon for usability innovations. Today we’ll look at an example of how Amazon helps customers filter product reviews when there are literally hundreds of them. Not only does Amazon help customers hone in on specific types of reviews, it also takes the opportunity to show relevant merchandising based on the customer reviews themselves. In this post I’ll also suggest something that Amazon isn’t doing yet that could help you save sales when review content actually discourages a customer to purchase the item in question.

I’m going to use the example of a book that’s going to be a top-seller on Amazon simply because it’s endorsed by perhaps the most influential television personality in the world - Oprah Winfrey. Most people will not feel the need to read reviews because they trust her opinion so much. Others will be so excited about the book they will read the reviews just to tide them over until the book arrives at their door.

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Dear Get Elastic Readers: We had some issues with Wordpress last weekend that resulted in a number of glitches with the site while the platform upgraded. Among other things, we lost our About Us page. Thanks to all who dropped me a line to point that out, and a new and improved About page is now in action - including links to my and Jason’s social media profiles (StumbleUpon, Twitter, Sphinn and Facebook). Have a fabulous weekend!

• One of the coolest discoveries I made this week was a new ecommerce podcast by SLI Systems. Check out the first two episodes with guests from Nebraska Furniture Mart and Vermont Teddy Bear Company. You can also subscribe through iTunes right now.

• Have you checked out our archive of the Get Elastic Ecommerce Podcast? If you’re a relatively new subscriber, you might wanna kick back with your favorite bevvie and make it a Blockbuster night.

• For you web designers, Alexis Brion examines the look of log-in boxes with 6 examples of good and bad design.

• Love the title of this one: 7 Most Likely Reasons Your Search Traffic Sucks from the SEOmoz blog.

• Rebecca Kelley from SEOmoz sat in on a PPC webinar and has an excellent summary of it. Very interesting points on how to handle Google’s Content Network.

• Bronto Software has teamed up with Return Path for a 3 part series on sender reputation and deliverability. This week’s post on image suppression and how it impacts deliverability is very insightful.

• If you sell through comparison shopping engines, check out Scott Wingo’s piece on managing long tail terms.
  

The common definition of email spam may be any piece of mail that isn’t opt-in or “solicited.” But the recent “Spam Complainers Survey” conducted by Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa set out to see what email recipients consider spam, why they report spam and what they expect reporting spam accomplishes.

The findings should make any email marketer nervous:

• 56% feel email from known senders is spam if it’s “just not interesting to me”

• 50% believe “too frequent emails from companies I know” is spam
• 31% are irked by “emails that were once useful but are not relevant anymore”

Opt-in subscription is not enough.

Customer Perceptions on Reporting Spam

ISPs and hosted email services offer “report spam” tools to help customers reduce the unwanted inbox messages. Sometimes customers don’t recognize your sender name or forget they signed up to hear from you. But 48% reported they mark items as spam for reasons other than “did not sign up for email,” including:

• “The email was not of interest to me” - 41%

• “I receive too much email from the sender” - 25%
• “I receive too much email from all senders” - 20%

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Here’s a tip on how to turn your customers into blogging evangelists: make it very easy for them to post customer reviews written for your site to their own blogs. Elastic Path is doing this with the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store.

After a customer has filled in his review, there is an option to blog the review, which is a simple process that takes about 30 seconds to port the review right to the blog.

I decided to do the bulk of my Christmas shopping for the family through Olympic Store last year. So I’m going to use an example of one of my own reviews to show you how this works:

After you complete your review you see this screen:

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Credit card companies protect consumers against credit card fraud by taking care of disputes whether they be incorrect amounts, credit card fraud, stolen credit cards or if the merchant never delivered the goods, or faulty goods.
These refunds are called chargebacks. Not only are they disappointing, but they can be downright dangerous to your online business, putting your merchant account at risk if you receive too many.

As an online retailer, you face the threat of customers that make a purchase, file a phony dispute with their credit card company and keep the merchandise and their money. And credit card companies have the right to pull that money from your merchant account (credit card companies don’t cover the cost themselves) – leaving you without the product and without the cash.

Common Credit Card Chargeback Cons

There are 5 common chargeback tricks that dishonest customers may pull:

1. Claim merchandise was never delivered.
2. Claim merchandise was returned, but the merchant never refunded the money.
3. Claim order was cancelled but shipped anyway.
4. Claim merchandise was damaged or otherwise unsatisfactory.
5. Claim they were not the one who ordered the product (credit card fraud).

Chargeback Comebacks

After disputes are filed, the customer’s credit card company will conduct a two week investigation. But your chances of winning the dispute are greatly improved if you follow this advice:

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Well it’s Good Friday and most of you are not in the office, so kick back with some egg nog (oops, wrong holiday) and enjoy this week’s Bloggers Digest. I do hope you take the time to check out my contribution to Problogger this week: Almost 7 Ways to Re-Optimize Your Blog Posts. There’s also a post on YouMoz by yours truly: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Store Blog.

• Justin Palmer does it again with his home-run 10 Steps for SEO-ing Product Pages

• DJ Waldow’s Sender Reputation: What is it and Why Should You Care? is a must-read for email marketers.

• Manoj Jasra blesses us with his Ultimate Google Analytics Resources roundup.

• Patrick Altoft shares his Guide to Geo Targeting for SEO and Usability. The last paragraph has some great advice on avoiding duplicate content problems for online retailers running country-targeted sites: write unique content for each site!

• Alan Rimm-Kaufmann wrote a fantastic article for Search Engine Land full of tips to help your landing pages load faster, as we recently discovered is a factor in your Google Adwords Quality Score.

Have a great long weekend!

…all your products on one page, that is.

The Wall Street Journal recently said of male shoppers:

“This group is a retailer’s dream: When shopping online, they spend more, make snap decisions — and return less stuff.”

The article cites research that suggests men shop in cyberspace just like they do in the physical world - they want to get in and out the door fast. Women on the other hand will browse, click, compare, browse some more - just for fun - then end up buying something in a physical store.

Enter Web 2.0

To facilitate the boys’ need for speed, Neiman Marcus has added features to its tie shop that show more product - faster. And I mean fast, go try it out yourself it’s like watching Indy cars (not sure how usable it is as it’s hard to control).

Neiman Marcus has also enlarges images when you roll over thumbnails, as we’re seeing more and more. This saves clicks and time.

American Eagle Outfitters “gets it” too. The AE site allows you to mouseover the product category from individual product pages. For example “View All Shorts” (notice the scroll bar?)

From the WSJ article: “Neimanmarcus.com now gives shoppers a way to view 52 ties at once in its new Tie Shop, instead of having to look at them nine at a time.”

The 1.0 Solution

Maybe you don’t have the development resources that Neiman Marcus or American Eagle Outfitters has. No worries, there’s always the “View All” link.

As easy as it is to do, many sites don’t offer a simple view all link. Hey I may have a pony tail but I hate clicking on page numbers as much as any man. It’s a simple usability feature that could help make the shopping experience better for men and women - without having to implement fancy Web 2.0.

Yesterday we posted on tracking affiliate sales placed by phone, and today we’re going to address two other marketing channels you may need to track if you take orders offline.

The simple solution is to ask customers where they heard about your offer / website. The problem is often customers don’t remember, or even worse can give you incorrect information. But there are at least 8 alternative ways to track conversions from PPC or catalog orders.

Serving Different Toll-Free Numbers

Use a script (like JavaScript) that serves up different phone numbers based on a referring ad network or other PPC engine (example: Google AdWords or Price Grabber). You typically would use one toll-free number per ad network, but you may want multiples if you want more specific campaign traffic (i.e. Valentine’s Day AdGroup separate from general AdWords or Google Search ads vs. Content Network).

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A major tick-off for affiliate marketers is merchants who prominently display a toll-free number on their websites or banner ads. If a customer decides to pick up the phone to place the order – the affiliate is not credited with the sale unless proper telephone tracking is used. This is called “leakage.”

Some merchants only show the toll-free number on the contact page or in the checkout process itself, nevertheless it’s a leakage opportunity.

High ticket items and B2B supply or software purchases are often completed over the phone, meaning hard working affiliate partners lose their commissions. Good affiliate programs should be ensure that commissions will be paid where commissions are due.

But how can you effectively track telephone conversions driven by affiliate marketers?

Tracking Telephone Affiliate Sales

1. Display Affiliate Tracking Number with Cookies

Merchants can use cookies to show customers an affiliate ID number which they can provide the customer service representative when calling in an order. For example:

1-800-555-5555 Reference Code: AB-123

This can be achieved with JavaScript. You could program this yourself, but some affiliate networks like Share-A-Sale offer it as an optional add-on.

Tracking numbers should appear on every page of the site. You could also refer to it as a Quote Reference, Bonus Code or Promo Code – but keep in mind that that implies discounts. Even if a customer clicks on a promo banner, she may end up buying regular priced merchandise.

2. Unique 1-800 Numbers and Extensions

Serving a unique 1-800 number for each affiliate is possible, but costly to work out on your own with your Telco. You can also create extension numbers through your existing telephone system. Example:

1-800-555-5555 ext. 64

Extensions are preferred over unique 1-800 numbers for a few reasons. You may have a branded, easy to remember toll-free number like 1-800-FLOWERS which you can’t mess with. Customers may also get a hold of your default toll-free number through a catalog or other print material. And the reference code approach could be significantly cheaper than additional phone numbers. Depending on which affiliate network you are using, you may get assistance in setting up a tracking system.

It’s important that staff are trained to ask for reference numbers. You may also want to dedicate a special phone line for affiliate generated sales. Depending on your sales volume and programming resources, you may credit affiliate sales manually or configure your system to track them automatically.

3. Call Back Forms

Another approach is to use contact forms which contain affiliate ID codes in hidden fields indicating whether the customer inquiry came through an affiliate referral.

4. Email Confirmation and Receipt Retrieval

Once a telephone order is processed, you can send an email confirmation that directs the customer back to the website to retrieve his receipt. So long as the customer is using the same computer that he used to research the purchase, you can recognize through the cookie where the conversion came from.

Email Sign-ups

You may also want to consider email sign-ups as “conversions.” It may make sense that any future conversions through special email offers be credited to the affiliate if the customer first became aware of or interested in your site through an affiliate, and creates an account or opts into your mailing list before the cookie expires.

Of course this would require special programming, and I’m not aware of any companies providing this service or even merchants who are doing this.

Lead Generation

If you typically have a longer sales cycle, you may want to program your CRM solution to track web referrals (entering manually or automated), using similar tracking systems as described above.

Conclusion

No matter what method you implement, it’s a good idea to make it clear on your affiliate program information page that you’re doing something. Savvy affiliates may not even consider merchant programs that don’t.

Of course, you’re also interested in tracking ROI for online referral source and offline marketing (like PPC, organic SEO, direct mail, catalogs etc). Tomorrow we will cover this in part 2 – Telephone Orders and ROI Tracking.

A Get Elastic reader asked a question last week about duplicate content issues, SEO and providing affiliates with content. Our reader manages SEO for an affiliate site which has a sub-program of affiliate partners that do not use their own content on their sites, rather opt to use the content from the mother-site.

He wanted to know what he could do to protect his site from duplicate content problems that arise from content syndication. This refers to the way search engines filter out copies of a page on multiple domains and choose one or two sites to actually rank for the content.

You as a retailer with an affiliate program may wish to provide content for affiliates such as expert / editorial product reviews, general advice / guides on the product or activities related to the product or even product description content itself. This is great affiliate nurturing on the part of your affiliate management team - but it’s vulnerable to duplicate content filtering.

What is Duplicate Content Filtering?

If a search engine returned a bunch of results for your search query that were pretty much the same, you would get a bit irritated, wouldn’t you? Search engines understand this, and have tweaked their algorithms to filter very similar pages so you get a range of results that are relevant, but still different enough.

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