Playing Nice With Your Customers: The Evolution of the Ecommerce Software Solution

Don’t irritate your customers. Seriously, just don’t do it. It’s never been a good idea, but now it’s even worse. Your newest ecommerce software solution will be to get people always saying good things about you, just like your mom told you should. Remember the saying, “Avoid the appearance of impropriety.” Yeah, do that, and then double, and then put a cherry on top because Google has changed the way it ranks pages so as to take negative feedback into account.

Negative Feedback Loop

Some sites used to not care if people were complaining about them, figuring that the internet is a big place and that any publicity is good publicity. And for a long time, that’s how Google treated them. Because a site was getting backlinks on pages that complained about it, ironically, the site would go up in the rankings. In fact, things were getting so crazy that sites were actively cultivating negative reviews in order to get better search engine results. (Although it has been questioned how much of their strategy depended on the negative links.)

Google Switcheroo

When people pointed out to Google how absurd this was, they took steps to fix it, and now, these negative links do not count in the rankings. It remains an open question whether they should actually hurt a site, but of course that might lead to lots of faslehoods, where enemy sites post bad reviews on purpose. That could get ugly. But it might also be entertaining. An all-out war between two boxing supplies websites could have many jabs and uppercuts, and the two sites would lock themselves into a death-grip where they both fail. Thankfully, though, you don’t have to worry about that happening because Google has taken care of it.

All this is important, not just because you want to keep a great reputation, which you obviously do, but you also want to be proactive in eliminating customer complaints. Bad cyber-press has more bad consequences than ever, so you need to go out of your way to make sure that you deal with problem customers before they throw a hefty wrench into your ecommerce software solution plans.