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Advertisements on E-Commerce Sites PDF Print E-mail
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I've recently come across a few e-commerce sites that were plastered with advertisements right on the homepage of the site.  And we're not just talking about ads for products or services that compliment the page's business, we're talking outright competition right there on the home page!

I've been building website for about 12 years now, and have been a real life web developer for going on 8.  I also consider myself to be a very idealistic person when it comes to websites....especially the one's that I build and or work on. 

When the notion of placing advertisements on an e-commerce website was first brought up to me I was taken aback.   Why would we want to allow other people to sell their products on our real estate?  We've spent a lot of time and money getting people to the site, why give them an easy exit with little hope for conversion?  Any company that spends time building a brand should agree with me on this.  There's no rules against it obviously, but to me it says the owners are lacking enough class that they're willing to throw away their customer's respect, for a quick buck.

 Now I suppose there are exceptions to the rule, and I don't want to sound like a hypocrite, but to me, its much more acceptable when Amazon places ads on their homepage (and even product pages).  Given the ridiculous amount of traffic that Amazon receives I can understand why they would want to monetize their online real estate as much as possible, I'll also note, that the ads served up on Amazon do not compete with the products they are selling you.  Seeing an ad for AT&T on Amazon's home page just doesn't bother me as bad as seeing an ad for Auto Accessories on J.C.Whitney's homepage.  To me the latter comes off cheap and money hungry while Amazon the internet powerhouse is simply capitalizing on their visitor's interest.

Now I don't want to seem too one sided.  I know there are two sides to every story, and so long as their side wasn't "I want more money" then I'd be willing to hear them out.  We all want more money, but we have to have some respect for the brand and properties we build or that traffic you're trying to capitalize on won't be there for very long. 

This is obviously just my opinoin, but I'd love to hear yours!  Post a comment and let me know what you think about ads on e-commerce sites. 


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Comments (9)
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1. 18-07-2008 12:19
Interesting article... i have seen most of the ecommerce website with advertisement. Recently, one of my clients was very keen put an google adsense ads in his ecommerce website, i was totally astonished. Don't you think that it was got something do with an attitude. The attitude of how serious and focussed is he in his business. If making a qucik buck out of website is his objective then why to sell prodcuts, it can altogether be a different busienss model. It's just my thought. I am against ad in ecommerce website.
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2. 22-07-2008 01:37
I think it has uses on some sites. I have a client with a B2B site with very niche products, and she makes quite a bit from ads and saw no decline in sales. Her website comes up for a lot of search terms that are related to her business but that wouldn't be from people looking to buy her products. So she can capitalize on that traffic by using google adwords. 
 
Another client is building several niche sites that aren't likely to convert sales until they build some traffic. In the meantime we're going to start out with some adwords on some of the sites just to see what happens. Then, as the client begins to really market each site sequentially, we'll remove the ads.
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3. 14-09-2008 21:45
Very nice article as this could be a decent argument.
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4. 22-12-2009 17:56
Yep. Magento sucks and a big one. 
I wonder what in world they were thinking. 
Oh yes they sell pdf ebook man what peice of crap. 
Beside the pretty face there is nothing there just a lot of garbage and sloooooooooooow. 
And I was complaining about Zencart. 
As far as better PHP cart out there I don't think it's exist yet.  
 
Cheers, DS
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5. 14-02-2010 18:05
Seriously horrendous community "support". 
 
Exceptionally pathetic documentation. 
 
Broken features everywhere. 
 
No fixes ever delivered. 
 
Meanwhile the enterprise version keeps getting updates and releases. 
 
Pathetic.
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