Add Product Reviews To Your Store

Posted on August 3, 2012, 11:05 am, by David Hills and received No Comments ».

There are only two things I needed to learn about user-generated Product Reviews to sell me on their importance – first,  they increase sales and second, they can increase your ranking in search engines.  We’ve all seen user-generated product reviews; most major sites have them.  You’ll typically see a 1 to 5 star summary followed by the key reviews and/or most recent reviews.  It turns out that even negative reviews can sell a product.  If the ratio of positive to negative is fairly large, then the negative reviews tend to legitimize the positive reviews.  In some cases, the features that one reviewer did not like or need may be exactly what another shopper is looking for.

The other benefit of implementing user-generated product reviews is for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  Search engines love fresh and unique content.  A good, user written product review is much more relevant to search engines than the same boiler plate manufacturer’s description that is copied and used on every other site selling the same product.

If you are using ShopSite Pro v11 sp2 it is easy to enable Shopper Product Reviews.  Go to Merchandising, then to Product Reviews, and click the Configure button.

 

 

If you set the Enable Reviews checkbox, you now have product reviews on your ShopSite More Info pages (i.e. product details page.)  If you have a custom template, see How to Add Product Reviews to Your Template.

There are a number of Review settings you can tweak such as whether a shopper needs to have purchased the product before they can review it, do you (the merchant) need to approve the review before it is posted, how soon after a product is purchased should an email be sent to remind a customer to complete a review, and so forth.

Here’s what a More Info page with Product Reviews enabled looks like:

 Sample Product Reviews Page

Reviews can be a powerful feature and you may even find out that your frequent customers love being able to share their opinions!

 

Pinterest as Another E-commerce Channel

Posted on June 6, 2012, 9:51 am, by David Hills and received No Comments ».

My wife will tell you that she is not a very technical person, nor is she someone who is up on all of the latest tech trends.  I’m the one that she comes to for advice on posting and tagging on Facebook.  She’ll question me on “what is this Twitter thing?”  If she needs an app for her phone, I’m the one to download it and set it up.  So imagine my surprise when I found out that she not only knew about Pinterest, but had an account on it!  Last week she followed a pin to a fabric site and added products to a cart.  She still needed me and my PayPal account to check out, but here was a rare sight– her purchasing online!

Pinterest is yet another social media site that has seen tremendous growth.  Currently, Pinterest appeals more to women.  It is great for sharing recipes, fashion trends, decorating ideas and so forth.  It does this by “pinning” to your Pinterest page a photo of, say, the finished dish for a recipe, thereby sharing it.  Pinterest is a highly visual site.

As of February, Pinterest had over 10 million users of which 80% were women!  Besides the “Other” category, the top visited categories on Pinterest include: Home Décor, Design, Art, Women’s Apparel, and Crafts.  Clearly, if you sell products in those categories or have merchandise that is aimed at female audiences, you should be on Pinterest.

To get your products pinned you need an engaging, high quality image.  Or, as I see some sites do, produce an infographic on some topic.  For example, here is an infographic on ShopSite (click to enlarge):

Since Pinterest is highly visual, some kind of image is key to getting them pinned by others.

Just as you can place HTML code on your pages for Facebook “Like” buttons or Twitter “Tweet” buttons, you can do the same for Pinterest buttons.  If you are using ShopSite v11 sp2, then from within ShopSite you can tell it to automatically put the “follow me on Pinterest” image on your pages and the “Pin it” button on your More Info (product) pages.  To enable these buttons, go to Merchandising > Social Media > Pinterest.  Once there, you’ll get the configuration screen (shown below) to select what you want.

Pinterest’s explosive growth has recently slowed.  But as indicated by my wife’s experience, it is another channel that may get your product in front of new customers.  So consider adding a Pinterest site to your Facebook, Google+, and Twitter ones.  We’ve followed our own advice and created one ourselves.

 

When to Require Proof that a Shopper is Human

Posted on April 24, 2012, 2:50 pm, by David Hills and received No Comments ».

Are we human or are we dancer?

My sign is vital, my hands are cold

And I’m on my knees looking for the answer

Are we human or are we dancer?

–        From the song “Human” by the Killers

You may not know what a CAPTCHA is or what the acronym stands for, but you’ve used it if you’ve ever had to view an image of some text and then type it into a form.  Usually, it is required before submitting a comment, sending a message, or registering for a site.  CAPTCHA is used to prove you are a human and not a program/robot (bot) trying to send spam or register malicious accounts to send or post spam.

Many people hate CAPTCHAs.  At best it is an annoyance and at worst it prevents legitimate users from accessing your site due to the increased complexity of deciphering the text in an image.  There are sites that tell you Why you should never use a CAPTCHA.  I, however, can think of at least one scenario where CAPTCHA is very useful.

Recently, we had a merchant report that his payment gateway was going to terminate his service unless he stopped inundating it with bad credit card submissions.  Apparently, a bot was constantly feeding credit cards to his checkout in hopes of finding one that worked.  CAPTCHA can prevent bots from submitting credit card numbers as in the example above.  However, CAPTCHA may also drive away your legitimate customers by distracting them from paying with images to decipher.

Fortunately, the ShopSite shopping cart allows the merchant to specify that a CAPTCHA is to be displayed only after a certain number of failed attempts.  In ShopSite, go to Commerce Setup, then Payment Setup.  At the bottom of the screen, enable the Human Validation feature and indicate the number of failures before the CAPTCHA is activated.  This allows legitimate “human” shoppers to have several attempts to input a valid credit card before CAPTCHA is displayed.

Unfortunately, there is no perfect solution for stopping all bots.  But in this case, CAPTCHA is a perfectly viable solution.

 

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