Promote Your Most popular Products to Increase Your Sales!
Many online retailers make the assumption that every visitor to their site knows exactly what they are looking for. While this may be the case for people that search for specific products on a search engine and click through to their store, it is not true for everyone. People often purchase based on impulse, emotion, or because other people are buying the same product. Very often “Best Sellers” and “What’s Hot” links get a lot of traffic on websites, because most folks can’t resist seeing what others are buying and they don’t want to miss the good stuff. Therefore, when creating your website homepage with the intention of getting your visitors to shop, it is wise to merchandise specific products along with typical category and shop links.
If you do not have time to constantly update your homepage with featured products, consider installing a Product Widget. Wikipedia defines a widget as a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. A product widget is basically a snippet of code that can dynamically pull data from a source and display products with their respective links. Because the data is pulled in real time, you can sit back and let it do all the work.
Your homepage isn’t the only place where you can benefit from highlighting popular products. Some merchants feature products on the order confirmation page after a shopper places an order – with the hope that they will submit another one! Others display their popular products on affiliate sites to help drive traffic to their own website. It is also not a bad idea to add a Most Popular Products widget to your 404 (file not found) page.
Nexternal’s shopping cart software provides a system-generated widget to display your most popular products on your homepage or anywhere you choose – you can select how many products to display and whether they are displayed as a list or in a carousel, you can set price limits of the products you’d like to display, and you can style it any way you’d like. Best of all, you can choose how popularity is determined – over what time period and whether popularity is calculated by number of orders, views, quantity ordered, revenue or product ratings. When this widget is used to display products on an affiliate site, Nexternal will even track and assign the affiliate referral.
To use the Nexternal widget simply go to the Products section in your Order Management System, click on the blue “widget” button at the top, make your setting selections and grab the code for your homepage or an affiliate site. Of course your dedicated Account Manager is always happy to assist.