12th May 2007

Prefill the Basket – Don’t Presell the Customer Twice

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Just thinking out loudly … Which is never a wise thing … I am not 100% convinced the whole presell philosophy always works or is always necessary, especially conversion wise.

Unless after the presell on you website or within a pay per click advert, following the affiliate link actually inserts the product in the shopping basket by prefilling the basket or taking the user directly to the checkout.

I have yet to come across enough programs which prefill the basket after we have presold them on our sites or ppc activity.

Surely this would increase conversion rates as they (meaning the customer) are taken further down the corridor of the sales process … otherwise in effect the customer has to be presold twice?! Once on your site & once again on the merchant site. Where is the logic in that?

I suppose what I am rambling on about is that affiliate links should have the ability to take customers to the checkout and/or shopping basket … for improved CR … they may even soar!

Correct me if i am wrong, but who says you cannot presell a product in 3 lines of ad copy on a ppc search engine and do ppc > merchant?

What’s the better user experience in terms of time & bandwidth for a customer and conversion rates for the affiliate?

a.) ppc > publisher site > merchant … noting no basket prefill thus a product is effectively presold three times

b.) ppc > merchant ….noting again no basket prefill but a product is only presold twice.

That’s why in a.) ie those merchants who allow use of their display url will always have priority over those who don’t permit it. Less leakage & higher % transition of traffic … unless the landing page has an option of several products and ALL take the customer directly to the checkout on the merchants site.

We have the ability to deep link as as we know these generally convert better most of the time, so why don’t networks and merchants take that next step.

btw this is something I brought up on a forum back on January 2nd, 2005. Maybe it illustrates that the industry still hasn’t evolved enough to at least give us the option and try on a larger scale.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 at 4:07 AM and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 9 responses to “Prefill the Basket – Don’t Presell the Customer Twice”

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  1. 1 On May 12th, 2007, Keith said:

    Good point Paul, I’ve long thought that product feeds in particular should have a deep link to the merchant basket or checkout page.

  2. 2 On May 12th, 2007, Rich Danby said:

    This is something I’ve also been looking at recently. So far I’m not convinced that sending the user further down the purchase line is going to have a big effect. I think preselling and then letting the merchant do the final sell has a few advantages: –
    It reinforces to the user where they are buying from – how many more emails will you get from people that think they ordered from you if you link straight to basket.
    For those users that realise the purchase is from a site other than the presell it helps reinforce the merchant is trustworthy.
    It helps avoid issues with the afiliate misseling what the merchant offers.

    I think those issues could be overcome with the right promotion, but I’m not sure it will improve CR.

    BTW in most cases it should be possible to add to basket with existing affiliate links and a bit of study of how the merchant’s sites work.

  3. 3 On May 12th, 2007, Paul said:

    Hi Rich, May I asked what specific channels you have tried i.e. books, electricals etc?

    In the mind of the customer, the need for reinforcing any message to quantify whether a merchant is trustworthy might include other factors on how well recognised a brand is with the potential customer. Perhaps users are getting more internet savvy.

    Re People thinking we matbe a merchant. Fortunately, we don’t get the quanity people emailing us anymore, it was never many, but now very intermittent & usually more like questions of where to buy something. The phone was different, a little more frequent, but since we don’t publish the number anymore so this has subsided.

    What grabs me most, is when you say “in most cases it should be possible to add to basket with existing affiliate links and a bit of study of how the merchant’s sites work.”

    This really intrigues me, I ‘ve always been impressed on how technically clever you are, especially when some of us were combating spyware .. that if it’s possible, then I will have to look into it more. However most of us affiliates are maybe not as technically gifted and it’s a request that networks & merchants provide this for us.

    I appreciate your comments, now perhaps I could push a few networks forward on that premise to maybe give affiliates that option, and it’s that option for affiliates I would like to trial & test.

  4. 4 On May 12th, 2007, Paul said:

    Keith,

    Great minds think alike. BTW I very much enjoy reading your blog. All the best.

  5. 5 On May 12th, 2007, Morley Mouse » Pre-sell and landing pages said:

    […] by a post made by Paul earlier today, his post seems to take a more retail angle on it with shopping carts and pre […]

  6. 6 On May 15th, 2007, Zak said:

    Hi Paul,

    I think it’s a good idea and it’s something we’ve been looking into (we’ve even looked into combining it with a £5 gift voucher too – now that would be cool!!).

    However, as Rich says – there are a few issues…

    1) It’s important from a logisitical perspective for the customer to know who they are dealing with.

    2) Potentially you/we may be missing a sales opportunity to upsell/cross sell if the customer goes straight to the basket instead of navigating through the site.

    I do fully appreciate what you are saying and think it’s something we need some more data on to see if it improves conversion rate. Maybe we should do some A/B testing and I’m more than happy to trial something with Prezzybox.

    Cheers mate.

    Zak.

  7. 7 On May 25th, 2007, Steve said:

    Amazon have done this for ages and the conversion rates I’ve seen from it are significantly better than for sending people to the product page again. When your own site is showing all the information you need in the merchant’s feed, why show it twice?

  8. 8 On February 29th, 2008, What Exactly is Unique Content? A Definition is Required » Affiliate Marketing Blog said:

    […] Prefill the Basket – Don’t Presell the Customer Twice […]

  9. 9 On March 20th, 2009, Why Should You Be Able To SEO For A Brand When You Can’t Do PPC For A Brand? » Affiliate Marketing Blog said:

    […] merchant. However, one advantage of direct linking from paid search is the following blog … Prefill the Basket – Don’t Presell the Customer Twice … where you don’t need to presell the customer twice plus you get 100% transitional […]

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