OK so I'm just updating some pages on my sites that promote flower merchants and I happen to click on the link to Ultimate Flowers. What do I see? Well as well as a very prominent phone number on the homepage I also see a huge ad urging me to "Order now in time for Valentines Day on February 14th" erm, its now February 27th.
I can only conclude that they don't care enough about their own business to update their site so I'm certainly not going to promote them on any of my sites.
What I'm listening to right now: Akon - "Konvicted"
Merchants, why don’t you keep your site up to date?
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6 Responses to Merchants, why don’t you keep your site up to date?
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Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I am the founder of ShareMyPlaylists.com, ContentNow.co.uk and some other stuff. I have no idea why I'm blue on this photo though but I like it!
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Merchants also seem to forget to update product feeds. Very frustrating as that makes the affiliate look bad in the eyes of the visitor.
There are lots of merchants like this. I stumbled across one merchant 2 weeks ago, still advertising Christmas delivery dates!
Either they are very slow, or maybe they are being very pro-active and are gearing up for next year?
All laughs aside, I truly believe that although the merchant should know better, this should also be the responsibility of the so called “Account Manager” at the network. I think some of their job specs need to be rewritten to include this and see it as a shortfall on behalf of the network also.
An interesting point – Perhaps they do not have enough traffic to justify updating their site for Easter yet, eh?
Regardless, they need to at least remove the out of date items. It would look better to have a blank space than to have out of date or erroneous information.
I feel this is one of the greatest challenges businesses face in getting successful results from their websites.
People are always asking about Search Engine placement and etc. But I feel before you worry about that you need to have a grasp on your content management.
Ok. I’m done. I will now descend from my soap box.
No excuse for being so out of date, but it’s interesting that you object to their phone number being so prominent.
I understand why you object – you might lose commission if people who click through from your site phone to order rather than ordering online.
But how many people are so reassured by seeing the phone number there that the order online when otherwise they may not have ordered at all?
TBH, I don’t know which is greater – the loss or the gain – but I wouldn’t discount linking to a merchant just because they show a phone number.
Of course, the ideal is to have the call centre track the affiliate code and log a commission, but will the volume of sales justify the cost of implentation and training?
Richard, this is a whole other topic so I’m going to start a new blog post about it….