After receiving requests from our customers, we’ve released three new software enhancements, including a Facebook like button for product pages, improved soft add to cart functionality, and canonical links for enhanced SEO.
You asked and we listened. Thanks to your input via social media channels, forum and conversations with our Out of This World Support™ team, we’ve taken time to add some enhancements to the latest version of our software. While we often focus on developing the next big idea in ecommerce, we also know that smaller steps can make a huge difference, which is why we’re proud to offer these new tools for your success.
Facebook “Like” Button
Facebook is where customers are flocking to converse with friends about products and brands. Thanks to this new enhancement, you can now simply enable a config variable in your admin to have a Facebook “like” button placed on each of your product pages. When a shopper clicks on the button, it will show up on their profile and be visible to all of their friends. Talk about social shopping!
Here’s what it looks like in the admin of your store:
And here’s what your customers will see on your product pages:
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Improved Soft Add to Cart
We heard some complaints from you regarding the way the soft add to cart functionality affected your customers’ shopping experience. We’re all about making site navigation as easy as possible, so we reworked the way this feature works.
Now, soft add to cart works on all category pages and can be dragged around the page. This allows customers to continuously see their cart without leaving important pages on your ecommerce site. Additionally, the soft add to cart box will only appear when the cart contains items. If there aren’t any items in the cart, there will be no pop-up, thus preventing unnecessary distractions during your customers’ shopping process.
Here, you can see how the pop-up contains products and has been moved from its original spot:
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Canonical Links
In short, canonical links work as redirects when you have duplicate content. This can best be explained by showing an example.
For instance, a category page with this URL: http://mystore.com/boxes_s/30.htm
has the following URL if you sort one way: http://mystore.com/boxes_s/30.htm?searching=Y&sort=1
and this URL if you search another: http:/mystore.com/boxes_s/30.htm?searching=Y&sort=7
When you have different URLs for the same page, search engines don’t know which page is most important, which dilutes the overall ranking of the page. Canonical links address this issue by essentially combining all these URLs to one, which is good for your overall SEO.
You can enable this feature in the admin of your software, under the Marketing, SEO tab:
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Please note that these enhancements are only available on the Winter ’09 release of our software – if you’re still on V5, here’s yet another reason to make the upgrade!
And there you have it! Three new enhancements that will help you climb atop the ecommerce throne. We greatly appreciate your feedback and encourage you to keep sending your ideas and requests to us. Working together helps make our software more effective and powerful than ever before.
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Happy selling!
- The Volusion Team
After reading this post we enabled the Facebook ‘like’ button and canonical links — TERRIFIC features. Thanks so much for these.
Hi Mark! Glad you like them. Hope they help you and Neutral Dive Gear as you enter the holiday season.
Way to go! We like the Facebook likfe feature!
Thank you for the new features. I just enabled the Facebook ‘like’ button.
These new features are cool, and really make a difference!
Keep up the good work! We enabled the ‘like’ & canonical link features. Always looking for a competitive advantage!
Great enhancements! Nice job!
Volusion ROCKS!!!
Thanks Volusion, I love the way the Facebook like is on all product pages. Now how do I embed the Facebook like on my Home Page??
Facebook is Le Chocolat and their help gives me a code and tells me to embed it but since I am using one of your better templates, I have no idea where to do this. Any help??
Hi Bernie,
Check out this article: http://support.volusion.com/article/adding-facebook-button-product to learn how to place the Like button on your home page. Read the section titled, “Displaying the Facebook “Like” button for non-Product pages.”
Hope this helps!
Yes! Thank you for the conical explanation and new feature add! I updated our site with the like button as well. And the cart updates are excellent. Keep the good stuff coming!
Love the “Like” button-hope it generates extra sales
the Facebook Like is awesome, will boost and cross sale from Facebook!
I think this is only avaviable for the new version, right?
If I have the older version, how can I just add the Like of Facebook?
Howdy,
Right, these enhancements are only available on the new version. While we strongly encourage you to upgrade to take advantage of these latest features, you can still add the Facebook code manually to each page by inserting a piece of code.
Please refer to the last section of this article: http://support.volusion.com/article/adding-facebook-button-product
The facebook like feature is great.
But how do I have customer like my home page?
You can find the code for the Facebook like button online, and then install that into the HTML of your home page. Keep in mind that this will only show up as a liked link on Facebook, as opposed to customers actually liking your Facebook page itself. If you want them to like your Facebook page from your home page, you’ll need to insert a different piece of code.