Widgets for online stores

    One type of site where web widgets can be especially useful is online shopping. Using widgets, you can
    • keep in touch with customers
    • make customers advertise the store
    • organize affiliate programs
    • create new sales channels
    • conduct advertising campaigns on social networks

    How? I will share a couple of ideas.

    I’ll immediately warn you that everything said will apply to stores working with consumer goods. If the company sells electric generators for drilling rigs or mineral fertilizers, it is unlikely that widgets will help here. But if household, photo and video equipment, books or even computer games, it is worth considering on this topic.

    The simplest thing is to make a widget to insert into the blog with product information. I don’t understand why no one does this: Yandex.Market has had such a function for a year now, but I’ve never seen it in online stores. From a technical point of view, this is quite simple to implement, no further support is required, and quite a lot of benefits can be brought.
    What does it look like? Just a button on the product description page: “Code for pasting into a blog,” and when you click on it, a text box appears with a code that the user can copy to himself. The code contains a link to the product image, model name, store name and a link to the description page. For example, a person comes to the store’s website and sees the Camera of His Dreams. Whether he buys it or not, it is a separate issue. But in any case, he will want to share his impression with friends. He sees the code to insert and copies it to his blog entry. Thus, the store receives:

    Code for insertion on Yandex.Market




    Yandex.Market Widget


    1. free word of mouth advertising
    2. link to your site for SEO
    3. a new "chip" for users that competitors do not have.

    And now even those visitors who do not buy anything can benefit the store by advertising it.

    A more complicated way is to make a wishlist on the basis of the store (wish list).
    The user selects from the directory what he would like to have, adds to the list, receives the code for insertion and uploads it to the blog. Or just gives a link to a wish list to friends (for example, before Happy Birthday). After that, other people already buy these goods as a gift for the birthday person, and thus, one person brings several customers to the store at once.

    Another option is an affiliate program on widgets. As a rule, the store - the owner of the affiliate program gives either its list of products so that the partners deploy their stores, or banners and affiliate links. But you can also give widgets for each product, similar to the code for inserting into the blog.

    And finally, integration with social networks . It opens up really huge opportunities, because each user of a social network is not an anonymous visitor, but a person about whom we can find out something: what he is interested in, with whom he is friends, what his friends are interested in, how old he is, etc. And on the basis of this, the online store can already find an individual approach to it.
    For example, you can give personalized recommendations in choosing a product: on the bookstore website, the user enters his LiveJournal nickname, the system makes a request to the social network, and receives a list of his interests. And if he is interested in psychology, he offers a choice of new items from the Psychology section, and if with gladioli, then from the Gardening section. Of course, by offering a blog insert code for the results, so that the news about the service spreads further: as practice shows, when launched correctly, the attendance of the service for a social network can easily reach several thousand people a day.

    Of the projects that really work on this principle, I know two.
    1) Shop Script contains product widgetsand baskets that can be embedded on pages. As I understand it, after a “file finalization” these widgets can be used to create an affiliate program.
    2) Designer online stores from PrivatBank: agentnano.com . It allows you to create your own small online store that fits in a flash widget, and place it on any site. Moreover, the ordering process also takes place directly in the widget. The statistics on the project page say that 973 such nanoscale stores have already been created, but in many of them 1-2 products are sold.

    If anyone knows more examples, please share in the comments.

    Do you think such approaches will justify themselves or stumble upon some “pitfalls”?

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