A Killer Widget – AddThis
As an online retailer, you are continuously looking for new ways to drive more people to your online store. Aside from existing customers, the best type of customer is one that has heard about you from a friend. There is an excellent widget available by AddThis that makes it incredibly easy for your customers to share pages on your site with their friends. It also makes it easy to bookmark pages with such services as Google Bookmarks and Delicious. Amazingly, the widget provided by AddThis is free! Although it’s been largely adopted by the blogging community, retailers are now realizing that they can benefit from the same technology.
From a consumer perspective, the AddThis tool is easy to use. Users simply click on a button and are presented with more than 40 options. Some popular ones include:
- Emailing the page to a friend
- Printing the page
- Booking Marking the page
- Digging the page
- Sharing the product on MySpace
- Sending the page to friends on Facebook
- Tweeting about the page on Twitter
- Bookmarking the page with Google Bookmarks
- Bookmarking the site with Delicious
- Adding the page to StumbleUpon
Merchants simply need to sign up for a free AddThis account, and then install a snippet of code on the pages where they would like this functionality. The snippet of code adds a small button to the page that is visible to consumers. It is really quite simple. AddThis also offers an analytics dashboard to registrants so they can see how often each service is being utilized, which pages are being shared the most, and where visitors are located that are using the feature.
The AddThis widget is free, easy to install, and a potential traffic driver – making it a no brainer for anyone that has a website.
After receiving a degree in Industrial Engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Alex began his career as a technology consultant with Accenture. In 1999 he left Accenture and founded Nexternal – a cloud-based eCommerce Platform company. Alex is passionate about eCommerce and online marketing. He is now a Senior Vice President of HighJump, managing the Nexternal business unit.
