Something very common in the eCommerce industry is online promotions. So popular are coupon codes, online discount vouchers, and gift certificates that there are entire sites dedicated to promoting promotions. That’s right! Sites like fatwallet.com, couponcabin.com, and others create online user forums or setup affiliate programs with specific products and plan their business ranking high on the search engine results page (SERP) for commonly search terms.

I’m sure you are offering types of gift certificates and promotions using vouchers or coupon codes on your shopping cart but are you measuring the effectiveness of the promotions? Even more important are you loosing potential online shoppers because they are confused or frustrated with out of date or inaccurate coupon codes they found on another website not partnered with you? Well here are a few tips to make sure that your shopping cart promotions are netting you new business not customer frustrations and abandoned carts.

• First off if you are going to offer promotions you need to have a page or section on your site with all currently available vouchers neatly organized and that page needs to be highly SEO’d or optimized for search. Some eCommerce merchants will actually direct their PPC campaigns like Google adWords to their coupon page. This ensure higher conversion rates for one but more importantly, if done right allows your page to rank on the SERPs when a customer searches your product and coupon together.
• Using alternative naming conventions is another nice way to curb the frustration potential shoppers have when they reach a site with outdated coupons. You are less likely to show up on their page if you don’t have traditional “coupon codes” . Why wouldn’t you want the free traffic you ask? Well let’s say that a potential customer is searching for your widget on discount. They may end up on one of these pages feel like it is a potential spam site and bounce immediately. Even if they do make it to your site the chances are the coupon is old and not working and they are now frustrated.
• If you are already dealing with the dilemma of shopping cart abandonment after coupon code errors try building a custom page for these customers and offering a different promotion. This obviously applies if you have a low conversion rate after an error on the checkout page but most likely it is low. Offering even a small discount with an explanation that the promotion they thought they were going to get has expired makes online customers feel special. This is very effective at salvaging sales.
• Eliminate coupons all together and find alternative ways to market discounts and promotions. Let’s face it coupons are a great marketing vehicle but adding it to your checkout page is clearly not a checkout optimization feature. Just by having the box there for a customer to fill a code in most cases prompts them to go to Google and search for a promotion. How likely are they to come back after a frustrating search. Or how likely are your competitors to be found with a similar or better promotion on similar products? This is something to take into serious consideration.

So moral of the story is coupons can be great for eCommerce business but they can also be a potential threat to your revenue if not analyzed and monitored effectively. You should have a very sharp method of tracking every promotion you’ve run. Knowing what customer profiles respond well to vouchers also allows you to better market to them in the future. For example, customers who first bought from you via promotion may very well be waiting for that next opportunity to save 10%. If you use email marketing campaigns maybe you want to select just those customers for a special? That’s it for tonight. Happy selling!

If you’re selling your product primarily online you know that cost per acquisition or CPA plays a major role in your profit margins. Basically, in one way or another you’re paying for every customer you have. The challenge is that for every one customer that actually commits and purchases your product there are probably many more that you pay to get to your site and evaluate but there’s not enough umph to get them to click purchase. This has a nasty effect on your CPA and can creep into your businesses earnings if not analyzed and performance checked often.

So how do you minimize the CPA and improve your eCommerce shopping cart”s efficiency?

First you need to understand what your conversion rate is. Are you running any type of analytic software on your store front site? If so then you should be able to customize that to report on your conversion rates. If you are paying for any type of PPC marketing whether adwords, banner ads, or some other type of marketing you need to track how many of those customers follow on through the process and act on a purchase.

Next thing you need to take into consideration is if your site is optimized to get customers in the momentum you desire. That should momentum to quickly select the product you want them to purchase and rush through the checkout page. E-Commerce is about money not beautiful sites with lavish designs. Way too many eCommerce web designers spend too much time building fancy sites that look nice but are not optimized for high conversion rates. When you visit your site what do you do? What are your customers doing? If they are spending time browsing or bouncing then you don’t have what you need. There are tools that can check hot spots on your site and you should be using them. Not only that but using a multivariate test to compare different versions of your pages. Focus on the checkout page with highest priority. The most attrition is in the form of shopping cart abandonment. Do you know what your abandonment rate is? Are you doing anything to improve this number? Does your shopping cart include tools to measure these analytic information? If not then it’s seriously time to start looking abroad.

Some other things to otimize your hosted eCommerce solution are making sure that your site is SEO friendly. Sure there are carts that claim to be SEO shopping carts or SEO optimized e-commerce platforms but things to look for are the ability to add good keyword content in Google’s preferred ways to all of your catalog pages. Making sure the templates are easily editable to ensure great results on the SERPs. Make sure that you can customize your checkout page for efficiency and that it supports cross selling and upselling of products.

I’ll have more time to write about this in the future but I want to make sure that all e-tailers are thinking about conversion optimization and SEO friendly e-commerce platforms. You can’t just throw your product on a webpage, stick a price to it, and sell. You’ll throw your money away too quickly to even learn what you need to be doing. Take your time, do the research on solutions, talk to an e-commerce consultant and choose the right developer to make sure your site, checkout page, and entire shopping cart is optimized for the one thing it’s built for, Selling!

Okay, I know it’s tough to rank up on the G but cmon lately it’s seeming impossible to do anything right.  G changes everything at least once a quarter now and the black-hatters are catching up too fast for them.  Oh, it’s keywords, no it’s meta, no it’s backlinks, no it’s pagerank, no it’s a balance. NO, it’s NOTHING.

In the last 9 months I’ve watched 12 properties that I own all eCommerce or pointing to eCommerce sites hosted with shopping carts get annihilated by domains that not only have next to 0 content but in many cases were registered less then a month before they were in the top 5 rank on G’s front page.  WTF. Maybe they’re trustworthy sites that posted a new topic and their strength took them to the top in record times. Yeah right.  They are on the front page before normal URLs are listed.  How is this happening. Well it doesn’t take much research to figure out how.

There are tons of techniques and even software available now for the crowd that’s willing to go to the darkside and not concerned with long term interests for their properties.  And why would they be with properties that look like atrocities (any tld, large character domains just to cover keywords, and $5 worth of outsourced content) . Then they use one of many techniques to artificially ping their site with thousands to millions of fake hits in order to get listed in rapid fashion.  Once listed they begin a process either manually or more often then not with software like seNuke to build a completely artificial backlink system called a link-wheel.  This has the ability to produce thousands of links a day. So in a matter of weeks or months at the longest there they are topping your site that you’ve spent years working on, writing your own content, doing your own research, trying to add some value to what you are selling rather than just profit from a few ads and bail next week.

G’s response. Well Mr. Cutts states in a YouTube response that while blackhat techniques will rise and fall your whitehat strategy will prevail in the longterm.  What about those of us that are feeding ourselves with eCommerce sales? What about those truly looking for a product review, or real information on a subject. One to two months to weed out the scam sites is not quick enough. That can costs thousands of dollars out of somebodies living income.

The question is how many will start looking into the grey area or darker to keep their domains ranking high enough to make money? It’s only a matter of time before everybody has to resort to lowre quality content an higher quantity of tactics just to survive. What does that do to the web though? What does that do to G?

Call me an end of world’est kind of guy but I think search is slowly dying in the way we know it. How many times a day do you hit G now compared to let’s say a year ago? An no not to see where you rank but to look for something or collect the news or research something. I see a huge trend of automating these types of processes. Leveraging social networks and trusted relationships for information, feeds for news, and trusted authorities like Amazon for shopping. My wife commented the other day she goes straight to stores she knows from the brick and mortar days or something she has seen on traditional advertising like Overstock.com, Amazon, and others because she’s afraid of where she’ll end up just by searching. Take for example, the term Dark Eye Circle. My wife like any woman spends way too much money on cosmetics and she was looking at some outlandishly overpriced solution for eye circles. First rank in G is a site that’s clearly bullshish.  It’s a review site pumping up a product with perfect 5 out of 5 review and the rest of the contenders with very poor results. I’d bet my yearly salary that the person who wrote the site has never even seen a bottle of the product little on try it and review it. So how does a manufacturer that say spent millions in research and development to make something real compete in the eCommerce world when they know that they’ll need to spend that much just to rank in the fastest growing way of marketing (search). I’m saying they eventually wont. They’ll find new ways to promote their product more affordable.

What is your take? Are you tired of bogus results busting through your hard work? Are you excited about techniques that ruin legacy competition? Let us know in the comments section.