The Easter holiday shopping season is in full swing, and it may just be your last chance to make some big sales before the back-to-school season starts. Many merchants are expecting this to be a rather slow summer shopping season so taking some time now to build a few additional inbound links and position your brand on virtual product shelves across the Web will serve you well in the meantime. Let's let at a few must-have backlinks for ecommerce stores and how to go about acquiring them.
Before we start, I'll go ahead and include the standard disclaimer: the sites listed below present opportunities for you to build backlinks and nothing more. There will be an investment (at least of your time) so understand that you'll need to build relationships with the users of these sites as you would anywhere else, ensuring message consistency across channels, frequently revisiting to promote competitive positioning and testing product offers to see what works in which community.
Also, even though you are participating in these sites for the purpose of gaining new inbound links (and hopefully sales), keep in mind that you will want to track the upstream traffic, monitor conversations and brand mentions and periodically assess your competition to make sure your ecommerce store is being seen in the best and brightest possible light.
Kaboodle: Users of this social shopping community (owned by Hearst) are able to find, recommend and share products with others and retailers are able to get exposure with those serious about shopping. The main feature available for retailers looking to get into Kaboodle is the Brand Profiles offering. Users can add products themselves of course but merchants can aggregate products from their main domain, showcase popular products, interact with the Kaboodle community and access activity highlights within the community involving your brand through the use of these profiles. Perhaps the best part of it all is that your site will get a link for all that participation in the Kaboodle community.
Wists: Backed by Gawker Media, Wists is a similar social shopping and recommendation site for power-shoppers but it has far less traffic than Kaboodle. The upside (again) of course is that they will indeed provide a link back to your site but you'll need to do some legwork to get that done. Publishers/merchants can include "add to wishlist" buttons on their site that will automatically extract thumbnail images of catalog items.
StyleHive: Another social shopping/ecommerce bookmarking site worthy of mention is StyleHive. Users of the site (which could include the likes of you) are able to add any product and a link to where users can find it. StyleHive was recently purchased by ThisNext (the two companies rebranded as CurateMedia) another identical service in the social shopping arena.
StyleFeeder: Now a division of Time, Inc., StyleFeeder positions itself as a personal shopping engine and it has long made waves in both the ecommerce and affiliate marketing space. Retailers interested in getting seen on StyleFeeder will need either to submit product data feeds apply to affiliate networks, (GAN, CJ, SAS, etc.) or work with Stylefeeder to receive a custom quote for bulk data uploads or special promotions.