Today, we all know how important customer reviews are to retailers and customers alike. They help convert buyers by building trust and confidence in the product, they reduce returns, draw long-tail search traffic and are a simple entry into on-site communities for ecommerce websites.

But there was a time when no one had them. It makes you wonder what we’re missing today that we don’t know we’re missing.

Let’s take another effective merchandising tool: cross-selling. Currently, ecommerce marketers are banking that their personal cross-sell suggestions or algorithmic-based recommendations will be relevant and attractive to shoppers. This *can* be really hit and miss. But what if we gave customers a crack at cross-selling?

Continue Reading:
User Generated Cross-Sells? Why Is Nobody Doing It? »

Last week we held an affiliate marketing webinar with Shawn Collins (recap and replay available). We covered a lot of ground in one short hour, but one area that wasn’t discussed in depth is how affiliate programs can affect your SEO.

Problem: Duplicate Content Knocks Your Pages from Search Engines

Some affiliate networks provide affiliates with direct links to your site with an appended URL including an affiliate ID. An example would be http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456.

When search engines visit your affiliates’ websites, unless your affiliate has added a “rel=nofollow” attribute to the link to tell search engines not to follow the link, the search engine will follow the link and index the landing page — a duplicate copy of your home page, category page or product page, wherever the link was pointing. If an affiliate builds up link juice with keyword-rich anchor text to its own copies of your page (for example, buying paid links on blogs), it’s possible that http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456 outranks http://www.yoursite.com. What’s worse is that the duplicate content filter might wipe out your page for showing in results for that keyword/s, especially when you have thousands of affiliates and thousands of duplicate pages. This means you pay commissions on sales from organic search that you otherwise could have attracted yourself.

2 Possible Workarounds

A 301 (permanent) eliminates this possibility as you tell the search engine that http://www.yoursite.com/?affid=123456 is forever the same as http://www.yoursite.com. And yes, any Page Rank the affiliate URL has will be passed on to your site. To do this, you likely have to bring your affiliate program in-house and create a proper tracking system so affiliates get their commissions.

Continue Reading:
Tips for SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs »

Thanks again to our special webinar guest today, Shawn Collins. A 10 year veteran of affiliate marketing both on the affiliate manager side and the publisher side, Shawn shared his expertise on a number of topics.

If you missed today’s call, here’s a full recap. If you would rather, just watch the on-demand version of the affiliate marketing webinar.

Affiliate Marketing Players

Affiliates - Refers to content publishers who promote your products for a commission or other monetary incentive including bloggers, product review portals, ezine publishers (experts on a topic with loyal mailing list subscribers) or even social networking sites like Imeem or Last.fm.

Merchants - Retailers (products) or site owners (memberships) that pay a flat fee, per click or revenue share with affiliates for sales or leads.

Networks - Networks like Commission Junction and Linkshare provide a marketplace of affiliate programs where affiliates and sellers can connect.

Continue Reading:
Killer Affiliate Management Tips With Shawn Collins »

Facebook launched 3 new advertising options for businesses this week: Business Pages, Social Ads and Project Beacon.

Here’s the gist of Tuesday’s major announcement and how it impacts online retailers and other businesses:

Business Pages

Sponsored Groups have been dumped for free profile pages for any brand or business. True, any business can simply create a profile and added friends, but Business Pages are unique.

Here’s an example of the Join (RED) Page:

Continue Reading:
Facebook Advertising - 3 New Ways To Play »

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.