Ecommerce Widget for Selling Books
When veteran companies like Random House embrace very forward thinking marketing practices like ecommerce widgets, the winds of change must be blowing.
What is a widget? Simply, a third party item that can be embedded in a web page. The most common being embedded Google AdSense ads or YouTube videos (most often found on blogs and social networks like MySpace).
What is an ecommerce widget? Well a widget that helps sell stuff of course.
Random House ‘gets it widget on’ in a similar fashion as the popular Amazon ‘Search Inside’ feature with something called ‘Insight‘.
Bloggers and social networkers can embed their favorite book widget so visitors to their blog or profile can:
- view the book cover
- view inside the book (or in the case of audio books, listen to a sample)
- buy the book (links into the product page of the online store)
- get the widget code themselves
The Random House ecommerce widget is seen below:
Learn more about the Random House ecommerce widget or read detailed coverage of the offering at Read/WriteWeb - Random House - Widgets and Web Services Done Right.
Note: Random House runs on the Elastic Path ecommerce software platform with excellent integration with SAP, which makes this story even more cool.
Jason-
This is a GREAT idea by Random House- an excellent idea to use the Elastic Path flexible platform to drive additional sales!
I am very curius how to get this widget running. I spent about an hour looking for the exact up load process, it was not explained very well and I seemed to miss the upload area. I certainly never found any code to cut and paste please explain in more detail this info!!!!
The plus sign on the widget. Mouseover and it says - add this book to my website. If you click it, it gives you a snippet to copy. Voila.
Thanks dude cool I thought that was add the book to my shopping cart type button!!
Love the help