Online merchants require robust ecommerce links, ones that increase conversion rates and make maintenance a breeze. There are several characteristics to these types of powerful and flexible ecommerce links:
- They are tied to an ecommerce platform;
- They are static URLs;
- They can redirect to multiple pre-defined destinations;
- The redirection to different pages can be easily managed through an administrative portal;
Links with these capabilities allow online merchants like you to lead targeted customers to a variety of optimized pages through just a single ecommerce link. In particular, these types of ecommerce links can assist you in a variety of ways, especially when it comes to:
- Updating buy links;
- Optimizing email campaigns;
- Routing traffic for testing purposes;
- Protecting parameters;
Updating buy links
Typically, your “Buy Now” links require a lot of time and effort to update, but optimized ecommerce links make updating old buy links much easier.
For example, when you release a new product – you need to cut out links that lead to a shopping cart with the old version and replace them with links that lead to a shopping cart with the new version.
Doesn’t that sound like a big hassle and a drain on internal resources? Your front-end administrator must now go in and start replacing links in the code. This creates a situation where an ecommerce manager is often beholden to a separate developer. By creating a system where link maintenance is in the hands of the ecommerce manager you reduce a lot of lag time and make your offering that much more efficient.
To make your job easier, make sure that all your “Buy Buttons” sit on top of a static link whose destination can be redefined at any time through an administrative portal linked to an ecommerce system. This allows you as online merchants to easily maintain a single link that can be changed whenever necessary.
Updating your buy links in this way also helps with your SEO: The static link which is connected to dynamic content prevents visitors from landing on a page with outdated content and also prevents Google from indexing a 404 error page.
Optimizing email campaigns
Let’s say you are sending an email blast to 1 million customers. The email was meant to contain a link to an offer for 50% off your product – but the URL parameter that defines the discount is missing!
Once the email is sent, there is no way to fix this mistake and update the link. When the email is received and the reader clicks on the link they won’t land on the page they expected to. Instead, they will land on a page that does not include the offer they read about in the ad. The visitor will likely feel disappointed and will trust your brand less.
However, if the links that tie into your ecommerce platform are static and easily adjusted from the back-end to redirect to different pages, then even if the email is sent, the destination of the URL can be adjusted to include the discount mentioned in the email.
Traffic routing for MVTs and A/B Tests
Should your “Buy Now” button direct traffic to the shopping cart page or directly to the checkout page?
Should you offer two, three or four cross-selling products? Which ones should you use and in which order? Is this true for both the US and Europe?
When you have been in the ecommerce business for a long time, you know that the answers to all the multitude of fine-grain questions play an important role in your overall success. Very small changes to the customer’s experience can significantly increase or decrease your conversion rate. By routing traffic to different pages, you let the market decide which experience converts best.
Imagine if a single URL could randomly assign different landing pages to site users. In this sense, traffic routing is another major advantage of links whose redirection is easily managed from an administrative portal.
In particular, traffic routing allows merchants to offer very targeted campaigns to different visitors, displaying very specific offers depending on the visitor’s location, language, browser or OS. Some specific tests you can run include:
- Restricting customers from certain regions from accessing your online shop when you have reseller contracts for those regions;
- Providing customers from certain regions with a special price point or promotion;
- Providing customers from certain regions with a different checkout flow;
- Providing promotions based on operating system;
- Automatically displaying the correct OS version to your customers in a product selection;
- Preselecting the best payment option per region;
Protecting parameters
One of the ancillary benefits of the types of URLs we’ve been discussing is that the static URL protects important parameters that come after a domain name. This is important because you don’t want people to simply change prices, or currencies or even different versions of the product on your website.
Keystone
Using a static URL to redirect visitors to customized destinations has many benefits for an online merchant.
Fabian Rothe contributed to this blog post
